ERING
PLEA FOR MEDICAL MISSIONS
3thaca, Sfttn Mark
CHARLES WILLIAM WASON
COLLECTION
CHINA AND THE CHINESE
THE GIFT OF
CHARLES WILLIAM WASON
CLASS OF 1876
1918
Cornell University Library
R 722.P13
The claim of suffering a plea for medic
3 1924 024 018 628
Cornell University
Library
The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.
There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924024018628
THE CLAI1VJ OF SUFFERING
•
* >«*
-,*•..
MOHAMMEDAN PATIENT WITH HER MOTHER AND BABY, RAMNAD
THE
CLAIM OF SUFFERING
A PLEA FOR MEDICAL MISSIONS
BY
ELMA K. PAGET
ILLUSTRATED
SECOND EDITION
(Sffoeig for the $rxrpagaiicm at ih* <&oavd in Jforrign fJari*
15 TUFTON STREET, WESTMINSTER, S.W.
1913
NOTE
The present volume, although issued by a missionary
society, does not deal merely with the work of one
particular society, but with the whole subject of the
Christian Missions which are being carried on through-
out the world. We believe that its perusal will accen-
tuate the interest of those who are already familiar
with the noble work which is being done by medical
missionaries in response to the " claim of suffering "
in non-Christian lands, and in the case of others will
create a desire to help forward this work by every
means within their power. There is no other branch
of Christian work of which it can more confidently be
affirmed that it only needs to be known to be sup-
ported with enthusiasm. We are exceedingly grateful,
and the readers of this volume will share our gratitude,
to its author who, amidst the distractions of a particu-
larly busy life, has made time to write. The gratitude
of our readers is also due to the Rev. E. H. Mosse,
the Chairman of the S.P.G. Medical Missions Com-
mittee, and to Miss Mosse for help in collecting
materials and in correcting the proofs of the book.
EDITORIAL SECRETARY.
S.P.G. House,
November, 1912.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. Evil spirits and medicine men i
II. Quacks and cures 17
III. The weak and helpless 32
IV. Surmounting difficulties 44
V. The dawn of hope 59
VI. The care of public health 72
VII. Teaching and training 87
VIII. Some s.p.g. hospitals 96
IX. An appeal iog
Appendix 117
Index 123
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Mohammedan patient with her mother and baby,
Ramnad Frontispiece
to face page
St. Martin's Hospital, Ramnad i
Hospital and school at Banting 8
Out-patients, St. Luke's Hospital, Nazareth ... 24
Doctor, nurse and patient in operating room, St.
Catherine's Hospital, Cawnpore 24
In-patients and staff, Ranchi Hospital .... 30
St. Stephen's Hospital, Delhi 38
Evangelist preaching to out-patients, Ranchi Dispensary 48
Patients awaiting treatment, Ranchi Dispensary . . 48
The main entrance, St. Agatha's Hospital, Ping Yin . 52
Village group of patients waiting to be seen, Ping Yin 52
Little girl patients leaving hospital, their grandfather
standing on left, St. Catherine's, Cawnpore . . 56
Group at front door, Malacca Medical Mission. Dr.
Staley and three assistants behind, four patients
IN FRONT 56
Lepers having feet dressed at Jercherla. Dispensary
hut in background 60
Dispensary tent, Karnal District 60
Mission Hospital, Rawal Pindi. Contractor and head
workman of church standing in front ... 64
Mohammedan convert and her little son, St. Catherine's,
Cawnpore 64
vii
68
7°
7 o
74
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
to face page
St. Luke's Hospital, Chemulpo (with Corean houses in
the foreground). main hospital building on the
left, women's ward on the right . . . . 68
Corfe Ward, St. Luke's Hospital, Chemulpo
Village women waiting for medicine .
In the consulting room, Rewari Hospital
St. Catherine's Hospital, Cawnpore .
Taking a patient to the plague hospital, Harbin, N.
China 80
A corner in the plague hospital, Harbin, N. China . 80
Dispensary at St. Aidan's Mission House, Durban, S.
Africa 84
Consulting room, Karnal. Dr. Scott, out-patients and
nurses 92
Biblewoman teaching patients waiting to see the doctor,
Karnal 92
St. Lucy's Hospital, St. Cuthbert's, Tsolo ... 98
Bullock cart with patients leaving hospital compound,
Karnal 102
Dispensary and compounder, Karnal 102
Dr. Laws and in-patients, Chin-Chun Hospital . . 106
In the Anne Vaudrey Ward, St. Agatha's Hospital,
Ping Yin, N. China 110
St. Agatha's Hospital, Ping Yin. Three nurse proba-
tioners no
Nurses and patients on the site of the new Nurses'
Home, St. Stephen's, Delhi, ign 114
Interior of ward, St. Luke's Hospital, Nazareth, S.
India n8
St. Luke's Hospital, Nazareth 118
The first hospital at St. Barnabas Mission, Mlengana,
Pondoland West I22
The back of Etalaneni Hospital, Zululand. Group of
house girls and convalescent children . . . 122
EVIL SPIRITS AND MEDICINE MEN.
MISSIONS ! Here indeed is a wide term, though it often
receives but a narrow interpretation. What do we
really mean by "Missions"? To some it is almost
the first clause in a creed, if we may use the word,
which begins with " I don't believe ". " I don't believe
in missions " people say with a fine sweeping general-
ization, and they are eager to back this assertion by
an appeal to those who have been abroad whether as
travellers or residents. It is clear to such people that
missions do a great deal of harm, that they involve
our representatives abroad and our ministers at home
in international difficulties of no mean importance,
besides spoiling the natives and unfitting them for
work. But here, as a rule, the critics part company,
for while some declare that missions render the native
insubordinate and independent, others urge that they
keep him in dependence for the capitalist to exploit.
If we really wish to understand what effect mission-
ary work has upon the natives we must study the
various methods of work, the conditions of the country
and people before the missionary came, what he
claims to have brought them and what the after-effect
has been. For when we talk of " Missions " we infer
(2M(2)0.I932I) I
2 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
a great variety of methods ; many means, in fact, to
attain the same end, a diversity of operations but the
same spirit. There is the evangelistic and pastoral
work of preaching and shepherding, including all that
we mean when we speak of direct conversion. This
must be judged by its fruits, which should be visible in
the diminution of slavery and cruelty and in the higher
ideals of womanhood and marriage wherever the Faith
of Christ is established. There should be a turning
from the rough principles of force to the principles of
justice and of love, and this should include the care of
the weak, of slaves, of widows and children. The
study of missions goes far to prove that this change
has in fact been made, that new and spiritual ideas
have been implanted ; we have seen a cathedral raised
on the site of a slave market, and have heard God's
praises sung where once murder and tyranny reigned
supreme. This is openly acknowledged in the Report
of a Royal Commission where it is stated that the
hope for the elevation of the African native races must
depend mainly on their acceptance of Christian faith
and morals.
But the word "Missions" includes educational as
well as pastoral work, the missionary who is pledged
to liberate the soul is also pledged to set free the
mind and to take pains that it be formed, trained, de-
veloped and controlled. Boys' schools, girls' schools,
industrial schools, training and special schools, univer-
sity work and university hostels are thus called into
existence by these true descendants of the holy men and
women of old who gave to us in England and to the
EVIL SPIRITS AND MEDICINE MEN 3
glory of God our universities and the foundations of our
primary and secondary education. In many cases it
is the missionary who has first given to the people a
written language and who has brought to them the
delight and companionship of books.
Again, this comprehensive word " Missions " carries
us to a further method, that of medical work. We
know well enough that there is laid upon us the care
of soul, of mind, and of body — Brother Body as St.
Francis called it, and the care of the body is an in-
dispensable part of missionary enterprise. And when
the missionaries claim that they have been able to re-
lieve the suffering, to heal the sick, and to reduce the
extent and the terror of sickness, so far as their narrow
means in men and money have allowed, it is com-
paratively easy to gather evidence and to judge if,
after all, their claim be a just one. They have inter-
posed — the critics of missions speak of " unwarrantable
interference " — and we have to inquire whether there
is any justification for such an interference ; whether
in this special work of healing the sick in obedience
to their Lord's command there has been any improve-
ment in the conditions of those to whom they minister,
or whether the natives were really happier when " left
to themselves " before the missionary came. So we
turn, for a moment, from the thought of our God who
is love and who is supreme over all His works, to the
" gods many and lords many " who are acknow-
ledged by the non-Christian people, and we ask what
answer has been made by those who believe in them
to the bitter cry of pain and suffering and disease.
4 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
Our first thought in turning to the primitive races of
mankind is of a people baffled and defeated by the
overpowering forces of nature. The overgrown tracks
beset with perils which lead uncertainly through the
entanglements of bush, jungle and forest, may be taken
as an illustration of the native's haunted, hunted pass-
age through a world of which he knows little and fears
much. The narrow footway affords no distant vision,
it is bounded on either hand by a tangle that no one
seeks to penetrate, and it is marked by the menacing
signs of wild beasts or with the war marks of opposing
tribes. For such a people, living in and accepting
such conditions, there is no thought or hope of order
in the uneasy universe ; creation is at once un-
intelligible and unintelligent, and this disorder is due
to "innumerable agents whose conduct can neither
be anticipated nor understood and who must be cir-
cumvented by bribery and cunning and expiation".
The whole external world is thus invested with human
personalities and human passions, and since the
external world, as known to a savage, is often enough
overwhelmed by calamity, he imagines that these
personalities are for the most part hostile to him.
In Africa " loyalty to tradition left by the ances-
tors and now jealously kept is the true practice of
religion," and the African recognizing no true order in
the universe has laid hold of custom as something that
has been sanctified by use and thus, in some sense,
represents a law on which he can reckon. Anything
contrary to custom is accounted witchcraft. His
worship is tribe worship and the vague being that stands
EVIL SPIRITS AND MEDICINE MEN 5
for God, Unkulunkulu, is in reality only the Tribe
Ancestry, while the immediate ancestors the Amatongo
are the dispensers of disease and death as well as of
prosperity and success. In some parts of Africa little
spirit houses are built near the other huts ; they are
not more than 8 to 1 2 in. high and there offerings are
made to appease the departed spirits of a father or
grandfather so that he may not return to plague his
relations. For this reason on the death of an import-
ant member of the tribe, slaves were frequently
sacrificed so that they might accompany the spirit into
the other world, there to serve him and wait upon him
so that he should be kept quiet and contented. The
grave of a chief's mother was shown to a traveller
not long since in East Africa, where over a thousand
slaves had been killed, for the woman had been much
respected in the tribe, and all the villages round had
contributed slaves for sacrifice at her death. " Do
not remember to take care of us," the people say
anxiously at a burial, for none can guess in what
mood the spirit will return even though they endeavour
to meet his insatiable appetite with their offerings of
cakes and beer that are placed upon the grave. Again,
among the wild tribes of British Malaya the spirits
that inhabit nature or natural phenomena are held
accountable for the visitations of smallpox, fever,
and every other imaginable ill. " There are horrible
creatures who shoot the arrows of disease into the
careless passer-by, birds whose prey is the health of
human life, ghosts who live on trees and pounce on
anyone who passes underneath, and ghosts who live
6 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
in the rivers to drag down the swimmers." In Borneo
all suffering is attributed to malignant demons, and
once during an outbreak of cholera 500 natives went
down the river in their boats in order to entice the
spirit of cholera to follow them out to sea. " Here
sickness," they shouted, "come along and we will
give you pork and dog's flesh."
But it is not only among primitive races that such
animism is found, even the great Eastern systems of
philosophy have been powerless to clear away this
tangled undergrowth of belief. Hinduism shelters no
less than three million gods who are for the most part
village deities intended to keep at bay the evil spirits,
but who, being themselves liable to fits of bad temper,
must be cautiously and regularly propitiated lest they
inflict the very evils they are supposed to avert.
In Chota Nagpur every pagan household has a
" home demon " or bh&t who lives in an earthen pot,
or in a peg driven into the floor, or in a hollow
bamboo. In Burma, notwithstanding its claim to
Buddhism, shrines may be constantly found to the
Nats or evil spirits. Outside the village of Nyoung-
Lu-Pin there was a great peopul tree inhabited by a
Nat named Myin-Pyoo-Yin, nobody might pass the
tree without taking off his sandals, nor break a twig
from the tree on pain of death. And Dr. Copleston,
the Metropolitan of India, has told us that the Bud-
dhists in Ceylon " people every wood with demons, go
to Hinduism for the personal guardians of house and
crop and the personal wielders of luck and pestilence,
and go to the basest sorcery for the personal agents of
EVIL SPIRITS AND MEDICINE MEN 7
malice and ill will ". The common people of Western
India also believe that cholera is a punishment sent
to men by an evil goddess who is called Murree
Ali or Cholera Mother, and they fancy that any
attempt to take medicine excites her more, and
that the proper way to get rid of her is to bribe her
with offerings to go elsewhere. Small temples are
built in her honour at the extreme limit of village or
town so that the goddess may be a little removed from
the homes of the people. These temples are neglected
except in times of epidemic when the devotees of
the goddess and her shrine, who are drawn from the
lowest caste, are brought into considerable prominence
and derive much profit.
It is much the same in China. There the Feng-
Shui or science of wind and water determines by its
mystical principles the lucky sites and lucky days,
for all are under the influence of local genii. Thus
an ancient book of charms contains a list of good and
evil days as well as describing the various methods
for the treatment of sick children. The day and
hour when the child first fell ill must be noted, and
then if there is a corresponding day and hour in the
book of charms the remedy will be found, and also
the name of the evil spirit which has caused the
sickness. It is no wonder that Mrs. Isabella Bishop
asserted that demonism is the force that really under-
lies all Asiatic religions ; they do not ask what is the
cause of the illness but who is the cause, and spell
must be met by counter spell and magic by further
magic.
8 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
Hence there springs up the race of witch doctors,
sorcerers, and medicine men, who claim to be mediators
between the seen and the unseen, who are supposed to
be able to undo spells, to exorcise demons, and to
name the terms of reconciliation. And these men
minister by fear to the sick man at the moment when
his mind is most helpless and most confused. The
Ngcira of Africa has been made familiar by many tales
of mystery and adventure. He makes himself hideous
with tails and skins and feathers, long chains made of
the bones and teeth of animals are festooned round his
neck, and when he comes to visit the sick man and to
discover the evil that has possessed him, he leaps and
shouts and waves his magic stick. "Why is this
woman sick? Because she has a swarm of black
beetles inside her. He applies intelezi (medicine) and
asks the people if they do not see the black beetles
coming out. Or it is a snake that has got inside her
backbone, or a lizard in her stomach, which must
be drawn by a cow-dung poultice. He applies the
poultice and there, sure enough, is the lizard which he
took care to apply to the face of the poultice before
he applied it." It would be impossible to estimate
the number of the victims of the Ngcira's deceit and
cunning, or to describe the horrors of " smelling out "
and kindred practices now abolished by the British
Government.
Only a short time ago the native parliament in
Toro (Eastern Equatorial Africa) condemned the witch
doctors and declared their trade to be illegal, this
action being taken on the initiative of the natives
HOSPITAL AND SCHOOL AT BANTING, SARAWAK
EVIL SPIRITS AND MEDICINE MEN 9
themselves without Government intervention. Hence-
forward if a witch doctor is discovered he is to be im-
prisoned ; and this decree has already resulted in
several hundred of these men being brought into
court. When they were examined as to their sup-
posed intercourse with the spirits some of them
answered, "Tukabiha abantu kwonka" — "We were
just deceiving the people " !
"In Borneo," writes a missionary, "when some
one is ill, the village folk use certain drugs which they
prepare from roots found in the jungle, some for
internal, some for external use. When all that can
be taken is taken, and all that can be smeared on the
body is smeared on, all washing is stopped, and the
friends of the sick man consult together and decide
that the witch doctor must be called in. His dress
is peculiar: he wears a long garment of any colour
reaching to the ground, and on his head is a curious
cap decorated with feathers, beads, and bells. In his
hand he carries his wand of carved bamboo, on which
fowl's feathers have been tied and fowl's blood has
been sprinkled, and on his back he has his medicine
chest or basket. As he approaches the village where
the sick person lives, his friends beat loudly on gongs
and drums to frighten away the evil' spirits. He
mounts the ladder leading to the sick-room and enters
noisily, sometimes shouting. He places his medicine
basket by the little palm which is always set up in a
sick-room in Borneo. Then he proceeds to examine
the patient and having decided what the illness is he
returns to his basket and begins to walk slowly round
io THE CLAIM OP SUFFERING
it and the palm, singing his incantations. Faster and
louder he continues until he is racing round the palm
and singing at the top of his voice. The drums and
gongs are still being beaten outside (imagine the
suffering of the patient while all this noise goes on)
and at last, it may be some hours after, the witch
doctor falls in a stupor or faint, and a friend covers
him with a blanket. His spirit is supposed to have
gone into the spirit world to find and recover the sick
man's spirit. For a long time he lies there, then there
is a movement ; he sits up, rubs his eyes as if awaking
from sleep, and looks as though he does not know
where he is. Then he approaches the sick man and,
claiming to hold in his hand the spirit that he has re-
captured from the nether world, he proceeds to rub it
into the patient's head."
Turning to British Malaya we find that there also
the sorcerer is the greatest power in the community ;
he is possessed by familiar spirits and he prophesies,
he can also extract the invisible darts of the demons
of disease. He is not even buried like a common
man but he is exposed on a tree or hut so that his
familiar spirit may tear open his body and release
his soul to re-enter a tiger. All such witch doctors
and sorcerers are fully provided with a stock-in-
trade of amulets and charms. The Ngcira has his
"intelezi" or spell medicine for every occasion, he
can use it to anoint the assegais before battle, or to
cure sickness, to give protection against snakes or cro-
codiles, or yet again to cause rain or find lost articles.
Near the Albert Edward Nyanza the witch doctor
EVIL SPIRITS AND MEDICINE MEN it
carries a small skin bag with stones inside so that it
may be rattled to represent the speech of the evil
spirit concerning the sick man. In India the Hakim
or medicine man goes forth in much the same way to
exorcise spirits or to suggest some sacrificial remedy
with the aid of drums and gongs and innumerable
amulets and charms. The true aboriginal charm
usually consists in a piece of some root, a bunch of
bear's hair tied on to a string that is worn round the
neck or arm, leaves, human bones, pebbles, quartz,
and small pieces of skin ; in Chota Nagpur the tooth
of a donkey that had been killed by a tiger was
considered unusually potent. Black and white marks
on a child's forehead are supposed to avert the evil
eye, and at Hazaribagh an earthen saucer with some
chalk marks upon it was held closely before the face
of a young mother, so as to give as little air as possible
without actual suffocation, in order to hasten the
birth of her child. Many of the charms or treatments
employed are intended to give vicarious strength, as
in the case of a young man who came to consult
Dr. Aspland of Peking about a big raw wound on his
arm. At first he would not confess the cause, but
eventually he was induced to explain that his mother
had been ill for some months and that as her strength
was failing he had hacked out a great piece of his own
flesh which had been stewed to a broth and given to her ;
it is a fine story of self-sacrifice even if actually it
could avail nothing. The Hindus and Mohammedans
alike believe in the value of amulets, which are vended
by various quacks and which consist in general of some
12 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
words written on a small piece of paper and enclosed
in metal cases. The late Dr. Pennell (of the C.M.S.)
in his book " Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan
Frontier," describes a fakir in Afghanistan who saw
three or four hundred patients at one sitting. He
would ask a question as to the nature of the illness and
then write out a charm ; as each applicant had to pay 5
pice as a fee the man was probably earning about 50
rupees or £3 6s. 8d. a day. He entertained Dr. Pennell
at the rest house that evening and made no secret of
the fact that he played upon the credulity of the
people, and when, after dinner, his assistant came
to say that many people were still clamouring for
charms, he hastily tore a piece of paper into squares
and wrote off the required number.
The jungle dwellers of Chota Nagpur and elsewhere
sacrifice cocks and other fowls to conciliate the powers
that send jungle fever and malaria. Dr. Muller, of Delhi,
was called to attend a poor woman whom she found
in a moribund condition, quite unconscious and in a
very high fever. The horns of some animal were put
at her feet and a cock freshly killed was cut open
and applied to her head like a cap. Again, in Ram-
nad, a medicine man was called in to a bad maternity
case, he began by shaving the girl's head, then a fowl
was killed and cut open and an incision made in the
girl's scalp, the fowl was placed over the wound and
after it had been well soaked in oil was set alight. A
few hours later the girl died. Such tragedies are the
more frequent in India as motherhood is supposed to
be specially under the influence of evil spirits.
EVIL SPIRITS AND MEDICINE MEN 13
This accounts for the following description by Dr.
Muller of a maternity case in a Nawab's house at
Karnal: "I was led through a courtyard, that was
crowded with weeping women, into a room the door
of which was heavily screened with thick and very
dirty curtains. Inside it was quite dark and the air
so noxious with charcoal fumes that it was impossible
to stay for a minute without feeling sick and dizzy.
Having removed the curtains and the three charcoal
stoves, I saw lying before me on a very humble
bed a newly made mother who had begun to show
signs of tetanus. The nurse and her other attend-
ants one by one had been obliged to go on the
roof to inhale fresh air. All nervous disorders are
especially ascribed to evil spirits, and the exclusion
of fresh air and burning of charcoal appear to be
necessary adjuncts of the ceremonies for their exor-
cism, so I am afraid that in spite of my advice the
charcoal fires and curtains were replaced as soon as my
back was turned." Dr. Mildred Staley, when working
at Delhi, gave three accounts of exorcism. " I found a
woman delirious with fever after childbirth. She was
propped up in a sitting posture on a filthy bed in a
dark cupboard and beside her crouched two old crones,
one on each side. Grasping her hair in their long lean
hands, they occupied themselves in violently shaking
her backwards and forwards with all their might and
main, tearing out handfuls of her hair in their vigorous
efforts to evict the evil spirit with which the poor
creature was supposed to be possessed. All but the
back part of her hair had 'thus been pulled out and she
i 4 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
was evidently starved as she swallowed some milk with
avidity." " One sometimes sees terribly sad cases of
neglect and starvation of the sick. One poor woman
whom I was called to visit had primarily suffered from
a slight and curable disease, but she had not been
allowed anything, not even a drop of water to wet her
lips for five days. This was by order of the native
magic men who wished to starve out the evil spirit
which they said had caused the illness. She must
have gone through great agony, but was quite past
hope when I saw her, and died a few hours later —
starved to death." The third case was that of a young
Mohammedan girl of sixteen who was suffering from
consumption and had been under treatment from the
local medicine men, this consisted in violently shak-
ing the poor child backwards and forwards for hours
together until she died from exhaustion.
In contrast to these efforts to evict and avoid the
demons we hear of a mother in Ping Yin, North China,
who threw her two-year-old baby away to die. His
convulsions had frightened her so she had given him
to the devil, and that the devil might know his own she
had daubed patches of black paint upon him and tied
pieces of dog-skin round his wrists. The poor little
baby was brought to Miss Phillips at the S.P.G. mission
and found to be suffering from meningitis ; the mother
was sent for, and she was no longer afraid when she
found her baby sleeping quietly under the influence of
bromides.
It is to be expected that people living under the
shadow of such dark and vindictive forces are filled
EVIL SPIRITS AND MEDICINE MEN 15
with suspicion and mistrust even of those who would
help them. Not long since a Chinese official fled from
a Christian dispensary in horror, as he was certain
that the castor-oil capsules that he had seen there were
the eyes of little children gouged out by the Christian
doctors. And there was a widespread belief among
the frontier tribes of Afghanistan that the British
Government was seeking by vaccination for a young
girl whose veins flowed with milk instead of blood
that they might carry her off to England for sacrifice.
The conception formed by most of the primitive race
is that of a multitude of gods who are at variance with
one another, and are not superior but rather inferior
to the men who seek to propitiate them. The people
can give but little answer to the problem of suffering
beyond the fact that it is vindictive and malicious, and
fear has so confused their minds that they have prac-
tically never tried to find any remedy or alleviation.
Indeed instances and examples might be multiplied
indefinitely as practically every non-Christian race
affords some illustration of the underlying belief in
demonism and the suffering it has caused. It is into
such a chaos of creed and custom that the medical
missionary brings his offer of help, and claims that the
"interference" is not wholly unjustifiable. He brings
a faith founded on the supremacy of God, and indeed
the first step in the conquest of pain is to acknowledge
that God is supreme over all His works, a moral Power
above creation. In this faith we are able to move for-
ward in confidence that disorder will yield to order,
that light will shine increasingly upon our darkness.
1 6 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
This was the answer given to Job that brought him
hope in the midst of pain ; and it is this knowledge
which will at last dispel the uneasy mists of ghosts,
and ghouls, and evil spirits that add a thousandfold
to suffering and disease, and that will give the patient,
hitherto kept tense by anxiety and alarm, the con-
fidence to commit the keeping of his soul to God in
peace "as unto a faithful Creator".
II.
QUACKS AND CURES.
It is curious that medicine and the healing art have
made such little progress among the ancient races of
China, Persia, India or the Moslem world whose civiliza-
tion had been long established before Europe had
awakened out of sleep. The need of suffering human-
ity is so direct and so urgent that it seems almost in-
credible that they have made no advance and little
effort to inquire into the cause and to relieve the
effect of disease. Yet such is indeed the case ; and it
forces the question as to whether some essential germ
of life and of wisdom and power has not been missing
from their development. The Christian Faith in
teaching the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood
of man has quickened the sense of love and sympathy
and responsibility in the hearts of men ; they have
been forced through all the ages to put that faith into
action and, notwithstanding innumerable mistakes and
even unworthy ideas, it has brought them to a clearer
understanding and a greater wisdom. The fruit of the
Spirit is love, it is the natural and essential outcome
of the Gospel ; but among the gifts of the Spirit are
wisdom, and counsel, and understanding, and this en-
richment has come in a wonderful degree to those
(17) 2
1 8 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
nations who accept the Faith of Christ — they do move
forward into light. If we would study an arrested
civilization we have only to turn to China that great
nation of 300,000,000 people who invented the com-
pass and discovered gunpowder before the Christian
era, who invented printing five hundred years before
Gutenberg and to whom we owe the culture and
manufacture of silk and the making of porcelain.
Archdeacon Moule in a letter addressed with great re-
spect to the scholars of China was able to congratulate
them on the great age of their institutions and dis-
coveries, and the age and importance of their literature.
He alluded to the fact that competitive examinations
had been in vogue for twelve hundred years and that
the Han characters now in use are, at least.two thousand
years old, and that Ch inese paper and pencils are of about
the same date. Yet we can hardly say that their pro-
gress as a nation has gone on unhindered and un-
checked, and when we turn to their study of medicine
and disease we find that they have apparently made
no advance at all.
According to Chinese tradition the semi-mythical
Emperor Shen-nung is accredited with having written
the first medical treatise as early as 2700 B.C.
Possibly he was a contemporary of Hammurabi of
Babylon in whose famous code we learn that " If the
doctor has treated a gentleman for a severe wound
with a lancet of bronze and has caused the gentleman
to die, or has removed a cataract of the eye for a
gentleman with the bronze lancet and has caused the
loss of the gentleman's eye, one shall cut off his
QUACKS AND CURES 19
hands ". However that may be, and notwithstanding
this excellent beginning made by Shen-nung the state
of medical science in China to-day is probably at lower
ebb than it was at the time of Hippocrates, and the
knowledge of anatomy is certainly inferior to that of
ancient Greece or Rome 2000 years ago. A later
Chinese saying informs us that "Medicine, fortune-
telling, astrology, physiognomy may all be taken up
as a trade or profession (as a diversion) by scholars,"
but it hastens to add that only the last is really
respectable. In a land governed by examinations
it is strange that no examination or qualification of
any sort has been required for a man to start practice
as a doctor, in fact the medical profession still continues
to be frequently used as a refuge for those who have
hopelessly failed in other pursuits. The functions of
the body are explained by the mystical terms of the Yin
and the Yang or the positive and negative, the male and
the female principle in nature, and sickness is supposed
to be some disagreement between these forces. Until
quite recently no dissection was allowed in the Chinese
Empire so that the anatomy of the body was decided by
the most ingenuous guess-work. Nothing is known of
the nervous system or of the circulation of the blood,
and every organ except the brain is said to have a pulse.
The heart is considered by them to be the centre of being
and therefore it must also be in the centre of the body,
the liver with its seven lobes contains the motor centres
for the eyes and the soul, and the larynx goes straight
through the lungs to the heart. The Chinese also be-
lieve that the brain is in the stomach, and an amusing
illustration of this is given by Prof. Cooper of Shanghai,
20 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
who once told a Chinese doctor that he had great
difficulty in learning and remembering more than
twenty fresh characters of the Chinese alphabet each
day. The doctor promptly advised him to get up
very early in the morning and then eat his rice so as
to keep the characters literally in his mind.
The Siamese hold an equally surprising theory of
anatomy. They have decided that as the whole of
nature is composed of the four elements of earth, air,
fire, and water the human body must be of similar
construction, and that, further, it is composed of twenty
different kinds of earths, twelve kinds of water, six
kinds of wind, and four of fire. According to the
medical opinion of Siam fever is caused by a dispro-
portionate amount of fire as dropsy is by too much
water, and there are exactly ninety-six diseases in
all to which the body is liable.
In China the doctors responsible for such compli-
cated mechanism are divided into two classes, the
internal and external, or, as we would say, the phy-
sicians and surgeons. The external doctor boldly
professes to be able to puncture the body with a
skewer in no less than 367 safe places in order to "let
out the wind," for they maintain that wherever there
is swelling there must of necessity be wind. As these
367 safe places include the lungs and the stomach the
results may be well imagined, and acupuncture is re-
sponsible for diseased joints and deep, suppurating
wounds, if not for blood poisoning and death.
Miss Phillips, M.B., when at Ping Yin described
some aspects of Chinese medicine '* Pinching, thump-
QUACKS AND CURES 21
ing, kicking, twisting, and needling are all practised
here, and it often gives more trouble to undo the effects
of the treatment than to cure the original complaint.
Pinching seems, however, to be very soothing to
hysterical women and we often see them with a collar
of bruises round their necks. Needling is extremely
common : the professional needle is a lancet-shaped
instrument with a handle of twisted wire, but the
domestic article is more commonly used and some-
times disappears into the part under treatment." The
Chinese still probe the abdomen with red-hot needles
as a cure for cholera, or thrust needles into the lungs
for pneumonia.
Medicines are often very expensive, and they are
extremely complicated in composition, the idea being
that if one of the ingredients fails to suit the patient
another will probably succeed. Some medicines may
have as many as twenty or more different ingredients
which all require to be boiled together and taken at
a draught. The effect of taking a bowlful of hot
nauseous liquid at night, followed by the heaping of all
the family bed-clothes on the top of the patient, often
causes a profuse perspiration which is probably the
most beneficial effect of the medicine. If the first
dose fails to effect a cure, another doctor is called in,
and so on till recovery or death takes place.
A list of medicines recorded in a missionary journal
gives a good impression of the " benevolent art " as
practised in China : —
" Flies are of great use to man, for their heads when
pounded and used as a pomade form an infallible hair
22 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
restorer for head, beard, and eyebrows. . . . Bats are
harmless animals and of great value in medicine.
Their flesh applied as a poultice is a sovereign cure
for the stings of scorpions ; roasted and eaten they dry
up the excess of saliva in infants. . . . There is nothing
better for that dangerous disease, lethargy, than to put
fleas in the patient's ears. . . . Certain devout and
religious people have been known to put bugs in their
beds that they might be more wakeful to contemplate
divine things . . . one purpose of their creation was
doubtless to keep us from pride . . . but the main
object of the creation of bugs was for the benefit
of the sick. They are of remarkable efficacy in the
hysteria of females, if one puts them in the patient's
nose. Seven bugs taken in barley water are of great
value in quartan ague and for the bites of scorpions."
It is interesting to note in passing that the germ
that causes leprosy has actually been found in the
house bug and it is probable that the disease is trans-
mitted by its means. Such " benefits for the sick "
are indeed unexpected! The following prescription
was used by a Chinese doctor : " Powdered snakes, 2
parts ; wasps and their nests, i part ; centipedes, 6
parts ; scorpions, 4 parts, and toads, 20 parts. Grind
thoroughly, mix with honey, and make into small pills.
Two to be taken four times a day."
A charming picture of a medical missionary of the
seventeenth century stands out in grateful contrast to
such practitioners. Fr. Bernard Rhodes of the Society
of Jesus was probably the earliest Christian physician
in China, and the account of his work that has come
QUACKS AND CURES 23
down to us is written by his contemporary Fr. Parennin.
" When his talents were known, and when experience
had shown what was his skill in surgery and pharmacy,
and even in the knowledge of pulses and diseases, they
esteemed him much more. . . . 'What a difference,'
they often said, 'between this European physician
and the physicians of our nation. They lie boldly
and undertake at great risk to sick persons to give
remedies for diseases they know not, as well as those
they know. . . . That man on the contrary speaks
little, promises little, and does much. . . . Nothing
disheartens him, he is always the same. His charity
extends impartially to everyone, to the poor as to the
rich. On leaving our apartments he goes to our
stables to visit our servants ; he attends them, he con-
soles them, he heals them. The only thing that gives
us pain is that we know not how to induce him to
receive the least trifle, merely to make such a proposal
is to displease him, and to make him run away.' "
The use of counter-irritants and cauteries have, of
course, their place in medical treatment, but to apply
boiling oil or fire to a wound is a somewhat drastic
exposition of the principle. Boiling oil was commonly
used in Europe to stop the bleeding of gunshot wounds
until Ambroise Pare, the Huguenot surgeon of Charles
IX of France, was unable to obtain a fresh supply of
oil while acting as surgeon to the French army in Turin.
" At last," he wrote, " my oil ran short and I was forced
instead thereof to apply a digestive made of the yoke
of eggs, oil of roses, and turpentine." The result was
so satisfactory that he " resolved never more to burn
24 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
thus cruelly poor men with gunshot wounds ". This
treatment, so long discarded in Europe, is still continued
in the East. Not long since a poor Indian woman
was brought to the St. Aidan's Mission for Indians in
Durban, and the medical missionary found that boiling
oil had been poured upon a small wound which had
in consequence become an open sore half a foot square.
Throughout the East little fires will be lighted in three
or four places over the painful area on the patient's
body, sometimes by means of a brownish powder partly
made of saltpetre, sometimes by means of small pieces
of rag, about the size of a shilling, steeped in oil. This
invariably leaves a bad sore, which may heal by slow
degrees, and it is no uncommon thing to find as many
as fifty scars on a patient's body as a result of such
applications. In one case brought to a mission hos-
pital for treatment it was found that a South Indian
mother had actually held her little boy's hand in the
fire by way of healing a small wound.
Sores such as these which have probably been caused
in the first instance by ignorant treatment are usually
plastered with mud and cow-dung which forms a hard
crust under which the ulcer spreads and putrifies. Dr.
Mildred Staley, when at Delhi, had to attend a little boy
who had been plastered in this manner for several
months. She had to poultice constantly for three
days before she could get his head fairly clean, when
it was found that the whole scalp was one deep ulcer.
Another case was that of a woman treated in St.
Catherine's, Cawnpore, who was suffering from severe
bruises across her chest, which had been smeared with
OUT-PATIENTS, ST. LUKE S HOSPITAL, NAZARETH
DOCTOR, NURSE AND PATIENT IN OPERATING ROOM, ST. CATHERINE'S
HOSPITAL, CAWNPORE
QUACKS AND CURES 25
cement made into a paste with some sort of vegetable ;
she is described as looking as if she had been rolling in
the mud. Such plasters are used in cases of suppura-
tion ; if the discharge continues to find its way through,
more layers of mud and cow-dung are added. The
use of such disagreeable applications is probably largely
ceremonial, for it is no uncommon thing for a high-
caste lady to send her servants to purify the ward
which she is to occupy in the hospital. This they
do by washing the floor, walls, and bed with water
from the Ganges. These are then rubbed over with
cow-dung. Burnt rags are spread over an inflamed
joint and poultices are -used; these are somewhat
better than the plasters, for they are usually composed
of figs, or the leaves of the castor-oil plant, or pounded-
up cactus plants. A pitiful case in Cawnpore was
that of a boy whose badly burnt hand had been soaked
in ink for some time by a native doctor, this left as
might be expected an unusually troublesome wound
that took long to cleanse and heal. Ophthalmia and
ulceration of the eyes are exceedingly common through-
out the East, and the usual remedy is to rub some kind
of powder into the eyelids ; pepper is commonly used
for this purpose, or charcoal which has been ground to a
powder and mixed with alum, or with bits of powdered
teeth and bone. A further source of such diseases
may be traced to the custom of " cleaning " the eye-
lids which prevails in China. The barber turns them
over to scrape them, and when inflammation ensues
the process is repeated until it results in permanent
injury to the eye. Leeches are constantly employed
in India for all manner of swellings. " I had seven
26 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
leeches put on," said a woman in Rawal Pindi who
was suffering from an abscess on her finger. " They
drank up my strength but they did not drink up the
swelling."
The abuse rather than the use of splints, and the
amazing carelessness and neglect are together respon-
sible for the constant cases of gangrene. Splints are
sometimes made of layers of very thin pliable pieces of
wood, each layer being separated from the other by tow
tightly bound round the limb and the whole soaked
through with oil. A little boy was thus brought to St.
Catherine's Hospital, Cawnpore, with a broken arm. He
was screaming in such agony that Dr. Dawson was
obliged to give him a small dose of morphia while she
attended to the fracture. The injured arm was so tightly
fastened that it had been compressed into half the size of
the other, the hand and forearm were greatly swollen and
the hand was quite cold. A typical case of neglect was
that of another boy brought to Murhu, he had broken
both arms five days before, one had become gangren-
ous and amputation was immediately necessary. Yet
another child inTsolo, South Africa, had his foot crushed
by a horse, and was left so long without proper attention
that his foot actually dropped off from gangrene. We
can judge what this means by the description given by
the late Dr. Pennell : " In the case of a fractured thigh
a sheepskin is tied on, a rough splint applied externally
and often left for a week or more. When there has
been an open wound and the patient has been brought
several days' journey through the heat down to our
hospital at Bannu, you can usually anticipate the
QUACKS AND CURES 27
character of the case by seeing the men, who have
carried the bed, carefully winding their pagaris round
their noses and mouths before proceeding to unband-
age it for your inspection, and when it is at last opened
all except the doctor and his assistant try to get away
as far as possible."
It may well be imagined that in such a pitiful con-
fusion, where the cure is often if not usually far worse
than the complaint, the patients have the vaguest
notions of their own symptoms. Mrs. Weston, M.B.,
of Nazareth, describes the initial difficulty in getting
an answer to the question, ' ' What is your age ? " "If
this apparently simple inquiry is put through an in-
terpreter, there follows a long and animated conversa-
tion embellished with gesticulations, at the end of which
the interpreter regales you with some remote piece of
family history — probably some land dispute between
different connexions of the patient years ago. If you
restate the question with emphasis a similar occurrence
may result, but at the long last you get for your answer
the approximate age of the patient's eldest son." Dr.
Dawson of Cawnpore quotes the answer of a woman
when asked the age of her child : "He was born after
his uncle went to Bombay," and on being further
pressed she added, " It was when flour was dear in the
bazaar ". Passing from the age to the " history of the
present illness " the patient or interpreter may hasten
to give symptoms which they think are suitable to the
case. " Are you sure he has such and such a symp-
tom ? " asks the white doctor ; " must have, must have "
is the answer, but on examination it is found that the
28 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
account is based on a totally erroneous idea of the
nature of the complaint. It is difficult to make a
satisfactory diagnosis when the patients describe their
illness in such terms as these, " All night long a pigeon
danced on my liver," " I have a sensation of a pot
boiling in my inside," or " I feel as if a bird was flutter-
ing in my leg ". It is more difficult still when it comes
to a question of caste, for then it may be that the
patient is on one side of the curtain while the English
doctor is on the other, and caste prevents him seeing
her. These bonds of caste survive even an English
education as in the case of a Sikh, house surgeon to a
Government hospital. He came one morning to Mrs.
Blair, M.D. , at her dispensary in Banda in great distress,
for his daughter-in-law, a girl barely sixteen years old,
was dangerously ill and he could do nothing for her;
incredible as it seems he had never seen her face, and
even then he might not touch her beyond feeling her
pulse. Mrs. Blair was in attendance for several hours
and finally had to tell the father-in-law that he must
give the patient chloroform while she operated. He
did so, at first administering it through the patient's thin
chadder, but before she was completely unconscious
the covering was removed, and for the rest of that
anxious night there was no further thought of pro-
prieties. Yet had there been no woman doctor the
girl might have died, though her father-in-law, a fully
qualified surgeon, was in the house.
Where there is such complete individual ignorance
we find, of course, that the health of the community
is entirely ignored. Sir Robert Hart has said that
QUACKS AND CURES 29
he remembers a coolie being drowned in the mud in
the Peking of old days; and drainage, scavenging,
lighting, and a pure water supply are unknown in
the East unless they have been introduced by Euro-
peans. It is probable that if such a place as Mecca
could be made sanitary and put under enlightened
medical care, there would be a real diminution of the
epidemics, the diseases and the suffering of the world ;
as it stands it is a menace to the health of all. Dr.
Aspland sums up the attitude of the Chinese so far as
the general welfare of the community is concerned as
that of " Dirt, Disease, and Doubt ". Dr. Phillips, when
at Ping Yin, wrote that there were no really clean
pools in Shantung, and that she had often seen a
mother washing clothes in the greenish-black water
of some stagnant pool, while the child at her side was
drinking the same water with evident relish. " China,"
writes another missionary, "is notorious for the entire
neglect of proper sanitation. Peking the capital . . .
has been pronounced by competent judges as the dirtiest
city on earth," and a native Indian army surgeon de-
clares, " It is almost needless to enter upon a description
of the sanitation of an Indian village, for there is a total
absence of it ".
Of course there are many quaint stories of the ignor-
ance of the common people, some of which may not
be altogether unfamiliar to our home experience. " In
visiting the poor people," Mrs. Weston tells us, "it
does not occur to one at first how extremely simple are
their domestic arrangements. It is experience which
teaches the desirability of carrying soap and towel and
30 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
also precludes the hope of anything to wash one's hands
in except a brass pot of about half a pint capacity, and
having a neck some 2^ in. in diameter." One woman
in Africa declared she could not stay in the hospital
because the walls were white; a Mohammedan lady
protested that she could only sleep with her feet in one
direction ; ointment to be applied to a wound has been
hung over the bed as a charm ; in Corea tincture of
iodine was readily drunk by a sick man, and the pills
that were given to a Chinese patient were swallowed
"in mistake" by his friend! A story that reminds us of
Silverlocks and the teeny weeny bear's porridge was
that of small Robert of Pondoland who was not even
allowed a taste of his own medicine, for, finding
that it had a pleasant flavour, his family swallowed it
all. At Ranchi a poor woman was attending the dis-
pensary with a fractured wrist and one day complained
that she was suffering from indigestion. Miss Poole,
who is in charge of the work there, suggested getting
some medicine for her, but the woman explained that
it would be of no use as the indigestion was caused
by her being obliged to eat rice with her left hand, the
right hand being often described as the " rice-eating
hand". The desire for much medicine is common to
all lands, and it is not always easy to explain to simple
people the need for operation. This was refused in
the case of a little child in Pondoland as her parents
could not be made to understand the nature of her
illness, a bad abscess in her side. " We wish drinking
medicine," they said, " to clear this matter up." Need-
less to say " drinking medicine " was of no use and the
QUACKS AND CURES $t
child died soon afterwards at her home. In East
Africa a woman, ill with fever, clamoured for the
" akoma " — the little iron thing — that had done her so
much good before. It afterwards transpired that she
meant the clinical thermometer!
Thus we find an impenetrable wall of ignorance that
has indeed " hedged in " the people, until the very desire
for advance has become foreign to them, and they
have lost all ambition or wish to learn. It is true that
the " unchanging East " has begun to change, that the
old examination halls are deserted, and that there is a
thirst for Western education. But that is beyond our
present subject. We have only to chronicle the fact
that these ancient and venerable civilizations that were
able to evolve deep philosophies and a fine and worthy
literature while as yet Europe remained dead to all
thought of progress, have, notwithstanding, failed to
meet the simplest cry of human suffering with an in-
telligent response. " The fear of the Lord is the begin-
ning of wisdom," we have repeated the words often
enough ; may we not now judge by the world's history
that advance in thought and enlightenment can only be
made where certain foundation principles are to be
found. There must be from the beginning a know-
ledge of the Divine wisdom, and a clear sense that
man is called to receive his share and endowment of it
from God. Thus expectation is kindled and the Holy
Spirit leads us through the strait places into a city of
many habitations.
III.
THE WEAK AND HELPLESS.
A CLOUD of despair seems to hang over the non-
Christian races and to render them helpless if they are
overtaken by misfortune or calamity. The Moham-
medan finds no reason for action when disaster over-
whelms him, for it is "Kismet" — an unalterable fate,
while the Buddhist only seeks to suppress sense and
emotion and to practise indifference that he may attain
to complete detachment. Thus he finds his ideal in
the face of the Buddha, a face of cold and apathetic
calm. So long as the lovelessness of God and the
helplessness of man is taught, it is impossible for joy,
that further fruit of the spirit, to come to fruition ;
men cannot gather grapes from thorns or figs from
thistles. Where, then, we look for mastery the East
only looks for escape or helpless, weary resignation.
To the Christian pain may become a factor in man's
moral, intellectual, and spiritual life; we do not deny
its existence nor underrate its sting, but we seek, with
confidence, to use it and in due time to conquer it.
So we believe ourselves to be by God's will masters
of our destiny, and acting on this assurance we have
seen disease retreat from territories where hitherto it
(32)
THE WEAK AND HELPLESS 33
has held supreme. But it is otherwise when men are
overshadowed by the thought of an inexorable destiny,
for there they make no effort to seek protection and it
naturally results in a vast disregard for human life.
The great visitations of flood, famine, and pestilence
find them totally unprepared ; they make no attempt to
understand, to investigate, or to overcome, and they
are left as they were found, helpless and indifferent.
The "Lancet" of 16 July, 1898, published the
answers to certain questions addressed by the French
Statistical Department to the Pasha of Damascus : —
" Q- What is the death-rate per thousand in your
principal city?
A. In Damascus it is the will of Allah that all must
die ; some die old, some young.
Q. What is the annual number of births ?
A. We do not know ; God alone can say.
Q. Are the supplies of drinking water sufficient and
of good quality ?
A. From the remotest period no one has ever died
of thirst.
Q. General remarks on the hygienic conditions of
your city.
A. Since Allah sent us Mohammed, His prophet, to
purge the world with fire and sword there has been
a vast improvement. But there still remains much
to do. Everywhere is opportunity to help and to re-
form. And now my lamb of the West, cease your
questioning which can do no good either to you or to
anyone else. Man should not bother himself about
matters which concern only God. Salem aleikum ! "
3
34 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
On the Afghan frontier a political officer asked a
chief whether he would like the Government to open
a dispensary where the sick might be healed and cared
for. " Sir, it is not what we want," was the answer,
" there are already too many of us ; a pestilence to
carry off half the people would be much more welcome."
In most Oriental towns the death-rate is estimated
at over 45 per 1000; and though we have indeed
little to boast of in England in regard to the question
of infantile mortality, yet we have at least reduced it
to under a 100 per 1000 births, as against an infant
death-rate in Bombay of 593 per 1000.
Naturally such fatalism presses very harshly on the
weak and disabled, for it is taken for granted that any
affliction not in the nature of ordinary illness is
irremediable ; and that as it was probably caused by
sin committed in some former life, it is a just punish-
ment to be borne without complaint and regarded
without pity. There are, for instance, two hundred
thousand or more lepers in India and, approximately,
six hundred thousand in China and two hundred
thousand in Japan, all of whom are left unrelieved
and unassisted on this account. If, as in the case of
India, there is any offer of Government assistance or
Government segregation, they are taught that it can
be of no avail and that nothing remains but the per-
formance of certain ceremonies by way of atonement.
Such an institution as a leper hospital has never been
established by native effort uninfluenced by western
ideas. But it was given as one of the signs of the
Gospel that " the lepers are cleansed," and thus they
THE WEAK AND HELPLESS 35
have become an historic charge laid upon all Christian
people. The courage that can be engendered by the
Christian view of this affliction is best shown by the
words of a Japanese leper : " We must not allow our-
selves to forget that though we are lepers we still are
men, and if we play our part as men we shall at least
please the Lord who became Man for us ".
The orthodox Hindu is strongly opposed to the
education of the deaf and dumb, of whom there are
some two hundred thousand in India ; again, it is held
that the affliction is a Divine dispensation and none
should therefore help the sufferer. It is also stated
that there are four hundred and fifty-eight thousand
blind people in India and, at least, five hundred
thousand in China, yet no one has investigated the
causes of blindness nor sought to prevent them. No
effort has been made apart from missions to teach the
blind or to develop their mental capacities, in fact in
the report of the Shanghai Conference, 1 890, it was re-
corded that "the Chinese seem to think that besides
begging, the only occupation for a blind man is fortune
telling and for a blind woman prostitution, and from
this sad alternative they are not even protected by
native asylums ".
The treatment of the insane is still much confused
with superstition and belief in diabolical possession.
We have not ourselves been very enlightened as to
their treatment until quite recent years, and even now
very much remains to be done amongst the feeble-
minded. But in China the method of treating the
insane has been to fasten the patients up in chains, to ex-
36 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
pose them to all weathers, or to smother them. There
is now an Asylum in Canton in South China, and the
London Missionary Society has an insane ward attached
to the hospital in Siao Kan near Hankow in Central
China, otherwise no provision has been made for their
care apart from that of starving or beating out the devil,
and no attempt has been made at proper feeding, or
decency, or normal cleanliness. The same methods
are pursued in the Mohammedan insane settlement El
Kudr, at Nablous, where the unfortunate people are
subject to much actual cruelty.
In wonderful contrast to this there stand the words
of a medical missionary : " Whatever time I can spare
from my ordinary work (in a medical mission) I give
to my own particular hobby, which is the care of
lepers and of the insane ".
But the burden of unnecessary suffering is laid most
heavily on the women and girls in eastern lands, for
there the inferiority of women is part of the religious
belief, and they count for a good deal less than the
monkeys, cows and other sacred animals. By the
creed of Buddha no woman can enter the desired
Nirvana until she has been re-born as a man ; and the
common interpretation of the Mohammedan paradise,
debased as it is said to be, has helped in the degradation
and humiliation of womanhood in Moslem countries.
It is hardly necessary to speak of the twenty-five
million widows in India, their sorrows have been
brought home to all. Many of them are mere chil-
dren, and yet they are left to hopeless misery and
untold degradation, as they are taught to regard them-
THE WEAK AND HELPLESS 37
selves as the cause of their husband's death on account
of some sin committed in a former life. The Eastern
conception of marriage and widowhood has not only
left suffering unrelieved, but it is responsible for end-
less ill-health and disease and a pitiful and reckless
waste of young life. "The raising of the marriage
age," writes Dr. Pauline Root, " was first agitated by
missionary physicians," and certainly it is almost im-
possible to exaggerate the physical evils of child
marriage. Mr. Kopargaon Ramamurthi, B.A., a highly
educated and orthodox Hindu, has expressed his
opinion with considerable force on this point : " Is
not a woman brought up in ignorance from childhood
to old age simply to minister to the animal wants of
man without complaint or, as Manu would have it,
' kept under control and used for conserving the re-
sources of her husband, for economizing expenses, for
cooking and for nursing children,' for all the world as
if she had no soul of her own to save ? . . . We hurry
her through marriage when she is but a little child.
We never think of the wrong done to her undeveloped
frame, nor do we care if premature motherhood ruins
her tortured nerves, and unfits her for ever for the
spiritual equipoise which is so essential to her salva-
tion. . . . Our religion itself is supposed to cry aloud
for her self-annihilation, and to demand greater heroism
and self-sacrifice from baby girls than ever a male is
called upon to display in his sixtieth year."
"These creatures are bad and stupid, what is
the use of talking to them ? they can understand
nothing." That was the verdict of the men who came
38 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
up to disperse a little group of women who had eagerly
gathered round an evangelist at Karnal. And this
judgment of a pitiless fate was expressed in the hard
obdurate expressions on the men's faces as they hurried
their women away. "They can understand nothing," —
and yet " should I not have pity on Nineveh, that great
city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons
that cannot discern between their right hand and their
left ? " Wives are bought like any other goods and
chattels and become the absolute property of the hus-
band, who may of course do what he will with his own.
During a recent famine in China it was easy to buy
a woman for the equivalent of a sovereign. This
is illustrated by a story from Afghanistan where, as
Dr. Pennell tells us, the Afghan adds to the ordinary
disciplines of a Mohammedan husband a further right
to cut off his wife's nose if she gives him cause for
jealousy. "Two years ago," he writes, in his book
" Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier,"
' a forbidding looking Afghan brought down his wife
to the Bannu mission hospital. In a fit of jealousy
he had cut off her nose, but when he reflected in a
cooler moment that he had paid a good sum for
her and had only injured his own property, he was
sorry for it and brought her to us to restore to her, as
far as possible, her pristine beauty. She had a low
forehead unsuitable for the usual operation, so I said
to the husband that I did not think the result of the
operation would be very satisfactory, but if he would
pay the price I could purchase him an artificial nose
from England, which, if it did not make her as hand-
THE WEAK AND liELPLESS 39
some as before, would at any rate conceal the de-
formity.
'"How much will it cost?' said the Afghan.
"'About thirty rupees.'
" There was a silence : he was evidently racked by
conflicting sentiments. ' Well, my man, what are you
thinking about ? Will you have it or no ? '
" ' I was thinking, sir,' he replied ; * you say it costs
thirty rupees and I could get a new wife for eighty
rupees. '
" And this was said before the poor woman herself,
without anything to show that he felt he had said
anything out of the common. I am glad to say,
however, that he ultimately decided to have the
original wife patched up."
Yet there are instances of a true and considerate
affection, of the husband's anxiety over his wife's ill-
ness and of splendid efforts to obtain medical help ;
there are men, indeed, who are pleased that their
women-folk should have the interest and variety of
the Miss Sahib's visit, and that they should listen to
her teaching and learn ; but the pressure of a system
and a creed are for the most part too strong and the
general evils that result cannot be gainsaid. The
mortality amongst the girl mothers at the birth of the
first baby is terribly high, and the account of two
patients, one a maternity case visited by Dr. Mildred
Staley when at Delhi, conveys some idea of the ap-
parent indifference to suffering that obtains.
" One hot Sunday morning I was called by a Hindu
o-entleman of good position to see his daughter, before
4 6 THE CLAIM OF" SUFFERING
her marriage a patient of mine. On entering the
zenana of the husband's house I was directed to a dark
and noisome cupboard where I found the patient, a
mere child of fourteen, with her baby girl. The stench
was fearful and the thousands of flies nearly suffocated
one, so I lost no time in lifting her up in my arms off
her filthy couch, and carrying her straight out into the
purer atmosphere of one of the crowded zenana rooms.
Undaunted by the storm of opposition around us, the
nurse who had come with me foraged for a spare bed-
stead and clean bedding, and we soon had the poor
girl laid on it. She told us that since the child's birth,
three days before, no one had given her a drop of water,
though she was raging with fever and the burning heat
of the season. With an experienced nurse planted be-
side her, and constant attention, she improved greatly
at first, but on the third night a native ' Medicine-man '
was called in by the family, and the nurse was turned
out then and there by him. However, the patient
called so incessantly for her ' Doctor-Miss-Sahiba ' that
eventually her relatives had to call us back again.
But it was then too late to save her. The husband
seemed greatly amused by my remonstrances, and got
married again within a couple of weeks to another little
girl. In another large Hindu House a young wife of
sixteen had long been suffering from internal abscesses.
Going one broiling July day to visit her as usual, it
was to find that she had grown faint in the early morn-
ing (owing to having been neglected all night by the
lazy zenana women), and so, thinking she was dying,
the men had thrown her from her bed and bumped
THE WEAK AND HELPLESS 41
and dragged her down the steep stone staircase to the
lowest floor, where she lay close to the evil-smelling
dust-bin, ready for removal when dead. In this, how-
ever, she disappointed them, and they presently had
the trouble of carrying her all the way back to the
zenana ; but at the cost of what terrible suffering to
the girls and women are such scenes enacted."
In Tripoli a little girl escaped from a harem and
fled into the street, but she was caught by four men,
two of whom were her own brothers, and, though in the
struggle her light garments were almost torn off her,
she was hastily carried back. No one will ever know
if the child had any cause for complaint or fear, there
was no one to take her part, to enquire into her suffer-
ing, or to redress her wrongs.
We are told that infanticide is by no means ex-
tinct in China where the birth of a baby girl is still
considered to be ill-omened, but even if it is not so
frequently or openly practised as in the past, there is
still an untold amount of neglect that constantly ends
in death. An African mother gave her baby girl the
grim name of Bazarwaki, or " What are they born
for? " and the pessimism of this question is re-echoed
from the East.
And sometimes the answer is one of such dark and
horrible tragedy that it hardly bears repeating. There
are the baby girls of India who, " married to the gods,"
are brought up to a life of revolting sin, in which
indeed they cannot long survive. It is merciful to
learn that the State of Mysore has taken the matter up
refusing to appoint new dancing girls to the temples
42 THE CtAlM OF SUFFERING
as the others die, so the profession itself may at
length cease to exist. These Devadasies or " servants
of god," for their hideous calling is ennobled by a
fine title, are given or sold as babies to the temple, and
are unable to choose or set themselves free, no matter
what suffering they have to endure. In China the
unwanted baby girls are left, it may be, in some
Buddhist foundling home whence, in due time, they
are sold as slaves or to a life that is worse than slavery.
It might have been of such children that Mrs. Barrett
Browning wrote : —
And well may the children weep before you !
They are weary ere they run.
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun.
They know the grief of man without its wisdom ;
They sink in man's despair without its calm ;
Are slaves without the liberty of Christdom,
Are martyrs by the pang without the palm.
Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly
The harvest of its memories cannot reap —
Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly —
Let them weep I Let them weep I
— Only we cannot let them weep.
A short time ago a deputation of leading traders
and others came to an Indian administrator with a
petition that he should open a local hospital for
women on the thoroughly unsentimental ground that
the mortality among the young wives was so high as
to occasion serious financial difficulties arising from
the cost of second marriages.
A new opinion is being slowly formed, and there is
evidence that the cruel prejudices of old-established
THE WEAK AND HELPLESS 4 j
custom are slowly yielding to new and more humane
ideals. But it cannot be denied that such ideals are
of western and of Christian origin, for there even ap-
pears to have been an inability to profit by the teach-
ing of their own religious leaders who are by no means
silent on these points. Mencius, for instance, en-
joined pity, and yet you look in vain for any hospitals,
or institutions for the lepers or the blind, or asylums
for the insane in China. Mohammed proclaimed the
man pious who disbursed his wealth among his kin-
dred, and to the orphans and the needy and the way-
farer, to those who ask, to those who are held at
ransom ; but there has grown up an indifference
to the weak and the defenceless, and the pilgrimages
to his holy city are stained by murder and pillage.
Fatalism has no answer for pain. " Therefore whoever
comes to witness his beloved one departing from life,
let him attend to the holy sages and cease indulging
in useless grief, but console himself with the thought
that ' In this we cannot have our way '." These words,
that formed part of the funeral dirge for Prince Siriva-
mosa of Siam, represent the mental attitude of the
Eastern people. We cannot have our way — Kismet,
it is fate ; and so without resistance they accept the
dirt, the disease, the suffering, yes even the sin as in-
evitable — and the bitter fruit of this spirit is despair.
IV.
SURMOUNTING DIFFICULTIES.
In contrast to these beliefs in many gods, this de-
pendence on a venerable civilization, or the helpless
resignation before an unalterable fate, all who follow
the Christ are bound by His supreme example to
care for the sick and to work for the cure of disease.
Our thoughts turn instinctively to the shores of
Galilee, to the narrow Eastern streets, to the pleasant
hill country : " and when the sun was setting, all
they that had any sick with divers diseases brought
them unto Him ; and He laid His hands on every one
of them and healed them ". So we are not surprised
to find that the first hospital in Rome, possibly the
first hospital in the world, was raised by a Christian —
Fabiola, the friend of Jerome; there she tended the
sick with her own hands devoting all her possessions
to their use, and finally extended her pity to the out-
cast lepers whom she gathered together that she might
wash their wounds and heal their griefs. And this
work of mercy has been carried on through all the
centuries of the Christian era. Dr. Russell Wells
points out that those who are engaged in the practice
of medicine in England must trace their descent from
the monastic practitioners who, like Rahere, first
(44)
SURMOUNTING DIFFICULTIES 45
founded our hospitals and tended those who were ill.
The very hood worn by the doctors is nothing more
nor less than the monks' hood, " and," Dr. Wells adds,
" none of the teaching schools in London are the
product of the State, they are all the product of a
desire to practise Christian virtues, and as a by-pro-
duct of following our Lord's command, there has
come an advance in medical knowledge ".
If the Church had been ever in danger of forget-
ting the care of the sick it was reminded of this duty
in the seventeenth century, by the will of General
Codrington.
Christopher Codrington was born in 1668 and had
been educated at All Souls' College, Oxford, returning
afterwards to his native country of Barbadoes and
eventually becoming governor of the Leeward Islands
at the early age of thirty. Six years later he retired
and sought seclusion on his estates in order to study
divinity and philosophy. The world he lived in could
not have offered great inspiration, slavery was estab-
lished and endowed all around him, and the religious
restlessness of the time must have been a disturbing
element for one who sought the peace of religion.
Perhaps he recognized more clearly, in consequence,
the needs of the age and summed up the result of his
prayerful thought and quiet meditation in his will
which is dated 1703. He leaves " My two plantations
in the Island of the Barbadoes to the Society for the
Propagation of the Christian Religion in Forraigne
Parts, erected and established by my late good master
William III, and my desire is to have the plantations
46 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
continued intire and 300 negroes at least always kept
thereon and a convenient number of Professors and
Scholars maintained there, all of them to be under
the vows of poverty and chastity and obedience, who
shall be obliged to study and practise Physic and
Chirurgery as well as Divinity, that by the apparent
usefulness of the former to all mankind, they may
both endear themselves to the people, and have the
better opportunities of doing good to men's souls,
whilst they are taking care of their bodys ".
This work of healing is clearly an important Chris-
tian duty, and like most duties it is by no means easily
fulfilled and needs a firm faith and a good courage if
the difficulties in the way are to be surmounted.
Medical work can never be the impulse of a moment,
for it would be poor science and poorer theology to send
inefficient help to those in dire need. The ordinary
medical course takes five and a half years, and many
examinations and much exacting work must be suc-
cessfully accomplished before the training is at an end.
Although at a crisis unqualified assistance may have
to be enlisted, yet, quite rightly, amateur medical aid
is much discouraged. The full medical course must
be followed by from six to twelve months' hospital ex-
perience, and by a short training in evangelistic work :
for the missionary doctor is pledged to the twofold
healing of soul and body. This is, perhaps, followed
at once by "marching orders," the destination is de-
cided (for without talk and advertisement the mission-
ary goes where he is sent) and the day of departure
arranged. Yet this must largely be a question of
SURMOUNTING DIFFICULTIES 47
finance, before now the societies have had to hold back
their missionaries for lack of funds. Even if this
difficulty is overcome we may fairly give one sympa-
thetic thought to that parting from friends and home
and kindred, even though it may be a sorrow that is
bravely borne by all who find their life's work away
from their native land, but which is none the less
acute because God's call has come.
So the big liner puts out from home, the English
coasts fade away and somewhere in the far distance
there are people who are waiting without realizing it
for the life that has been consecrated, trained, and
prepared for their service during at least six or seven
years.
Nothing is more disappointing than to know what
is needed and have to be content with less; the
societies feel it bitterly enough, but the keen doctor,
fresh it may be from a London hospital with all the
newest appliances and an almost inexhaustible supply
of nurses and assistants, must find it specially hard
to be patient with the makeshift devices and heart-
rending surroundings abroad. Medical missions are
commonly accounted as the most successful pioneer
agency of the Church, but it is indeed pioneer work
to open the medical mission and literally to build it up
in regard to practice and premises from the beginning.
Soon after his arrival in Murhu in 1904, Dr.
Kennedy started medical work and it was conducted
on the most informal lines in his own house, and
as there was much curiosity to see a Dr. Sahib's
house the attendance was very large. His tiny study
48 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
became the dispensary, and the out-patients waited
their turn on the back verandah as far as the limited
space would allow while the rest sat on a bank facing
the house. The verandah, out of which one sitting-
room and bedroom opened, had to serve as an oper-
ating theatre, and one of the bathrooms was
sometimes requisitioned as a hospital ward. One
patient, a Hindu, who had his lower jaw removed
for cancer, stayed there for three months with his
attendant Brahmin and left at the end of that time
quite recovered. Two years later he came back on
a visit and gave a donation to the little hospital, which
had then been built. This hospital would scarcely
be dignified at home with the name of Cottage
Hospital ; it contained two wards, one with nine beds,
the other with five, and a dispensary and operating
room combined. At first the only assistance given
was by a young lad gradually trained to act as com-
pounder, but it was found that when Dr. Kennedy
was away during the cold season visiting in the
neighbouring villages the attendance naturally fell off,
so that, as soon as funds permitted, an Indian Chris-
tian surgeon was secured as assistant, and he quickly
proved invaluable. The Cottage Hospital has been
replaced by a larger hospital with eight wards each
containing two or three beds, thanks to a legacy from
an English friend and the help of the S.P.G. Medical
Missions Department. Dr. Kennedy had already
struggled through similar difficulties in Chitarpur
towards the end of 1898. There he had begun by
camping out under a grove of mango trees, holding
EVANGELIST PREACHING TO OUT-PATIENTS, RANCHI DISPENSARY
PATIENTS AWAITING TREATMENT, RANCHI DISPENSARY
SURMOUNTING DIFFICULTIES 49
his dispensary in the open air until it was promoted
to a shed made of spare doors for walls and a
carpet for a roof. He pushed on the building of a
hospital, collecting materials with wonderful energy
and making excursions to Ranchi and Hazaribagh
in order to obtain ready-made doors and window
frames. Some big timber was required for the roof
and there were some suitable trees in a- grove fifteen
miles away which was kindly offered for the purpose
by the Rajah. But difficulties again arose as the
villagers believed the trees to be haunted, and the
local Brahmin declared that terrible things would
happen if anyone dared to fell them and so disturb the
demons who lived in them. Dr. Kennedy had to
turn for help to the Mohammedans, who were ready
to give some assistance so long as he cut down the
trees himself. Directly they found that no harm
happened to him they were ready and willing to join
in the work. Dr. Kennedy has a genius for making
the best of the most unsuitable materials and for
starting work when many would give up in despair.
Fully qualified medical assistance is a necessity and
we should be content with nothing less, but where
there are no assistants all must help. Dr. Kennedy
was called upon suddenly to operate on a boy with
a bad compound fracture of the right arm. While
examining it he was able to draw out a piece of the
humerus several inches long. There was nothing
possible but amputation and this was done at once,
the compounder giving the chloroform, and Mrs.
Kennedy and Bishop Westcott assisting.
4
So THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
Lack of proper accommodation must be a severe tax
on the patience and the nerves. A nurse writing from
South Africa describes the one large room in which
her work is done. "Just inside the door I see the
patients. In another corner my one in-patient lies
with a screen to shut her off if necessary. Here I read,
write, sew, and teach the native girls whom I am
trying to train as nurses. We have meals here and
the girls iron and do all their work at the big table."
When Dr. Phillips first started medical work in Ping
Yin (China) in the spring of 1 906 she had no hospital
accommodation though the patients thronged in in un-
manageable numbers. " If only I had some kind of
hospital," she wrote, "no matter how poor, I should
feel contented with it, but I have practically nothing
— only one small mud-room in which my patients,
their friends, and the Chinese nurse must sleep and
eat and live." A year after she reported that " there
were very large attendances at the dispensary, par-
ticularly on market days (every fifth day). . . . From
1 April till 1 3 July I had 3 1 70 attendances, that is at
the rate of 1000 a month, the ordinary number at the
busy season or market days is from 90 to 100 each day.
On many occasions I have had more : I have had 1 30,
132, 134, 154, and 156 on different days. Last year
I had Miss Bearder's help during the first two busy
months, but since that time I have been single-handed."
During an itinerating tour Miss Phillips began her
consultations at 8*30 a.m. one day and, except for
a ten minutes' interval at ten o'clock which the people
reluctantly allowed her, she continued work until 5 p.m.,
SURMOUNTING DIFFICULTIES 51
finishing by candlelight after having seen 174 patients
in all. There is now a proper hospital at Ping Yin
which is the result of such patient endurance and per-
severance.
In .1906 when work was reopened in Pondoland
(S. Africa) after a lapse of twelve years, Dr. Mary
Cruickshank started a small dispensary with only two
compartments, the roof being of thatch. The first
patient who was brought to her was a "bewitched
man " who had been dragged from kraal to kraal in
the attempt to shake off the spell. At that time none
of the drugs or instruments had arrived from England
and yet an operation was found to be necessary ; to
add to this, on the day fixed for the operation the
patient was too ill to come to the small hospital, so
Dr. Cruickshank was obliged to go to him. The few
bandages which were all that the mission could provide
were soon exhausted and towels had to be cut into
strips and a needle was used instead of a scalpel. In
another case Dr. MacMurtrie of St. Lucy's Hospital,
Tsolo, was called to attend a boy fifteen miles away
who had been badly gored by an ox ; the patient lay
on the floor of the Kaffir hut and the only available
light was from a sixpenny lamp, but his wounds were
successfully dressed. A second Tsolo boy had his
jaw badly injured by a horse ; the broken fragments of
bone were joined together and his recovery was com-
plete, but, owing to a lack of proper appliances, Dr.
MacMurtrie was obliged to use a carpenter's bradawl
which was, of course, first sterilized, and some tinned
copper wire which had been originally used in an
52 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
electric-light fitting ; by these means the broken pieces
of bone were successfully united. In Corea, Dr. Laws
opened his medical practice at Chin Chun in a collec-
tion of straw-thatched sheds which were ready to col-
lapse whenever there was a gale of wind, and his
operations had to be performed on a packing case
covered with rubber sheeting.
An account of an operation from Rewari (N. India)
affords further illustration of the many difficulties that
have to be overcome ; it is taken from a letter written
by Dr. Marie Hayes, who was called to rest after three
short years of crowded work. " I must tell you what
happened on Monday, the day when both the patients
came in, and when both had to have operations under
chloroform, the hospital staff at the time consisting of
three, viz. the Biblewoman, the compounder, and one
nurse. I got Samokar (the head nurse), however, who
was out at a private case, to come and help ; the sweeper-
woman's services were also necessary, and even then
each one wanted three hands. (Besides these Dr.
Muller had come over from Delhi.) When the abscess
was opened it was so appalling that the Mihtrani (the
sweeper-woman) had to depart at once. A little time
longer, and we beheld the anaesthetist gradually falling
insensible over the patient's head. Fortunately her
part of the proceedings was over, so Sundar (the Bible-
woman) holding on to the patient with one hand,
lowered the fainting woman to the floor with the other,
where she remained until the operation was over."
From Delhi and Cawnpore come descriptions of the
appalling misery of the Indian homes where, under the
THE MAO ENTRANCE, ST. AGATHA'S HOSPITAL, PING YIN
VILLAGE GROUP OF PATIENTS WAITING TO P.E SEEN, PING YIN, N. CHINA
SURMOUNTING DIFFICULTIES 53
inevitable conditions of dirt and darkness, it would
seem that surgical treatment was almost out of the
question. " The doors of their rooms are often so low
that I have to stoop quite double to get in, and I like
to begin by ordering out as many people as possible,
for there are usually ten or twelve squatting figures
who comment loudly upon the bad symptoms, and re-
late how a neighbour died with just such not many
days ago. Then I crawl in and try to make out the
patient in the darkness until my eyes get used to it
and the smoke, or perhaps the people bring a wee
taper floating in oil. The patient is generally entirely
covered up with a thick quilt well tucked in over her
face. I once asked a woman standing by why she
did not give some water to a poor old woman
lying helpless on the floor of her house ; the reply was,
' How can I give her drink when she is a Mohammedan
and I a Hindu ? ' " Again, " Soon after I came here an
operation had to be performed in the filthiest house
imaginable . . . there was absolutely nothing in the
way of comfort for the patient, and cleanliness was
only a dream. The floor of mud, partly a swamp, and
nowhere to set anything down except the floor, mud
walls inhabited by all sorts of living creatures, and
such crowds of people ! Our first proceeding in go-
ing to a case is to try and get rid of some of the
dozens of children who are always about. ' Hat !
Hat ! ' (meaning ' Get out ') is a very useful expres-
sion to use to dogs, cats, and small children ; it is not
polite enough to use to everyone." "While prepara-
tions were being made for the operation the people
54 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
who were Brahmins were exceedingly particular that
we did not touch anything belonging to them. Water
would be poured from a vessel held at arm's length
high above our basins, their skirts would be drawn
together if they came anywhere near us for fear of the
slightest contact, with difficulty did I procure all I
wanted. It was wonderful to note the change in their
attitude towards us after the operation, then they
couldn't do enough for us. Water was given to me
in one of their own brass pots, I waited for it to be
poured out by one of them. But I was told to take it.
' May I touch it ? ' I asked. ' Touch it, why not ? '
was the answer, ' Is not this your house ? ' The
mother was determined that I alone should give the
medicine I had prescribed. 'You are Brahmins,' I
said, ' will she drink it from my hands ? ' ' You have
given her back her life,' they replied, 'so why will
she not take it from you.' "
There are of course many personal discomforts that
have to be overcome or forgotten. A long June day
in a Delhi operating theatre means no light work when
the heat is intense, and if by chance a dust-storm is
raging no windows can be opened. In fact in a bad
dust-storm it becomes so dark that one can hardly dis-
tinguish the windows at all, and there is " dust in your
mouth and in your hair (and as one's hair is always
wet, there are the elements of mud), dust in your sponge
and basin and brushes, the towels thick with it, and the
floor, in spite of various sweepings, nearly ready for
digging ". " There is a gritty feeling about everything,"
wrote Dr. Alice Marval, the doctor who was to lay
SURMOUNTING DIFFICULTIES 55
down her life in the plague. "I should like to have
a duster always tucked into my waistband . . . the
insects too of every sort are a worry. Some eat one's
clothes, some one's papers and pictures, some bite
one, some get into the sugar, some into the ink, making
stains everywhere when they come out ; some buzz
round the lamp and make it messy all over ; some
rush past one and drop with a startling thud upon the
floor." Then there are the long journeys in heat or
cold to visit a patient, and the doctor must be equally
ready to bicycle or ride, to drive in a rough native
cart or to walk. Dr. Mildred Staley writes from
Malacca in grateful acknowledgment of a parcel of
medical accessories sent out to her from home : " Your
packet of absorbent wool came just in time, and is
already used up for some very urgent clean dress-
ings. The very day after it came I was called to
perform a major operation on the daughter of a Malay
headman some miles away. It was a great triumph
to get their consent, and they dreaded the chloroform,
but all went well, and I have been going (with the
dressings !) every other day though it means a terrible
walk on soft mud paths into the heart of a mangrove
swamp, all among the most loathsome land crabs and
mud fish, and crossing wide rivers on single bamboo
poles which wobble."
Under such circumstances as these we need to claim
that spirit of power, and of love, and of a sound mind
which has been promised us and which will enable the
workers to overcome all obstacles whether of insuf-
ficient help and accommodation, of race or of dim-
56 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
ate. Indeed it has already transformed the makeshift
mud huts or wattle sheds into adequate and well-
equipped hospitals, and we look for its influence in
the extension of medical work. But the success that
crowns the work and satisfies the worker comes when
across the wide divisions of race and language, of
caste and ritual, love has begun to answer love.
Away in Jercherla (S. India) there lives an old
Brahmin woman who was the bitterest antagonist of
the mission. She used to persuade her neighbours not
to come for advice or treatment. " They use the
medicines as charms," she would say, " they only want
to charm you into becoming Christians, if you go to
them you will believe as they do and lose your caste."
She was living with a young Mohammedan woman
whom the lady evangelist used to visit, and, to mark
her displeasure, she always left the house when the
missionary entered it. Then she fell ill, and gradually
got worse and worse and a carbuncle formed near her
knee. No one could relieve the pain, so the young
woman who lived with her persuaded her to come to
the mission. The poor old soul walked up one morn-
ing and the exertion made her faint. The missionaries
heard of this and managed to send for her every
morning, and when they found out that she was not
getting sufficient nourishment they provided that also.
Now there is no more loyal friend of the mission, and
day by day she may be heard exhorting the patients
to trust the mission workers. " I was against them once,
but I know now what love means — they are my parents
and I am their child. And caste? What is caste?
LITTLE GIRL PATIENTS LEAVING HOSPITAL, THEIR GRANDFATHER STANDING
ON LEFT, ST. CATHERINE'S, CAWNFORE
GROUP AT FRONT DOOR, MALACCA MEDICAL MISSION. DR. STALEY AND
THREE ASSISTANTS BEHIND, FOUR PATIENTS IN FRONT
SURMOUNTING DIFFICULTIES 57
I believe in the good qualities they show, that is their
caste." So also with the Jercherla man who came with
a bad back which was entirely covered by cruel-looking
ulcers. " Do you know why I am doing this ? " asked
the missionary as she gently dressed his wounds.
" Yes," he answered, " you are a believer in Jesus Christ
and you try to do good to me because you serve Him,
and when you die He will call you and say, ' when
you were living in Jercherla did you think with love
and pity on those in pain ? ' and you will say, ' Yes,
Lord'. Then He will say, 'Yes, that is true, and be-
cause you did it to them I look upon it as done to Me '."
We can overhear the patients talking in the hos-
pitals: "What care would you get at home," says
Bed No. 1 contentedly, " if you were lying ill there ?
Why it would be a great thing if anyone were to pass
you a drink of water!" "Your mother-in-law beat
you till she broke your arm," says another, "your
own mother could not take more trouble than they do
here to make it well again " ; and a third, unable to
speak as she regains consciousness after chloroform,
clasps her thin hands together in mute gratitude.
" One face stands out in my memory, typical of
many another of India's women," wrote Dr. Mabel
Stevenson, " the wife of a poor Mohammedan tailor.
Coming into the dispensary tent (during an itinerating
tour) she fell and kissed my feet. ' You have come
back at last,' she said, ' how I have waited ! What ?
You don't remember me ? I, who was blind, to whom
you gave sight? Yet daily have I prayed to Allah
that you might come back to tell me of your God
58 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
who gave you the gift of healing' So we went
together to her mud hut, and talked much of the Great
Physician, Allah's own Son. ' True, true,' she said,
'but how can we remember, we, ignorant stupid
women? We will treasure His Name in our hearts,
and pray in it, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ' I can see
her standing on her doorstep, waving farewells, half
smiles and half tears, and calling, ' Come back soon,
very soon '."
Surely then the cry of suffering has been heard, and
little by little light steals in upon the mystery of pain.
We cannot fully understand that mystery even now, but
we watch it already retreating where once it reigned
supreme, we see it already interpenetrated with love
and pity, and compassion ; we recognize already the
victory in pain and we look confidently forward for
victory over pain.
" Why does God let us suffer if He is so good ? " It
is a question asked fervently from an Indian sick-bed
and the Christian doctor listens for what answer the
little Christian native nurse will make. "If God
sends the suffering, He sends the good too. And we
learn by His suffering how much He loves us — He
who was God! and" — the voice hesitates — "a great
deal comes from dirt and living in sin."
V.
THE DAWN OF HOPE.
When William Langland in the " Vision of Piers Plow-
man " was seeking for an image of the Incarnation, he
said that " Truth telleth that Love is the Treacle of
Heaven". The words were written in an age when
medical science in England was in its infancy though
many monasteries and convents had already shown
their compassion and opened their doors to the weak,
the sick, and the needy. And amid a multitude of
distasteful remedies ranging from bitter herbs to boiled
adders, Genoa treacle stood out in pleasant and singu-
lar contrast, a medicine altogether to be desired. So,
indeed, the Incarnate Love comes with wonderful
healing and sweetness, a very " Treacle of Heaven " to
a world that had vainly prescribed for suffering and
sin, by stoicism and fatalism, by theories of retribu-
tion and vengeance, and by counsels of unemotional
detachment. Love hoping all things has created
hope. No one dreads the tender ministrations of
love, and because fear is calmed, hope can rise. It is
indeed the rare and special flower that springs into
life wherever the Christian Faith has passed, Pandora
may hastily close her box to keep in the gift, our
Blessed Lord has scattered it freely in a despondent
(59)
60 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
world. And the little mission dispensary is a practi-
cal illustration of this very practical hope. There are
no lack of difficulties, as we have seen, that must be
overcome before the doctor can organize his work.
Love brings him to the spot, the love which has given
him the clear sense of vocation (and here we have a
word that is in itself a creed proclaiming the relation-
ship of God and man) so that hope follows in natural
sequence — " He that hath begun a good work in you
will perfect it ". No one can deny the vitalizing force
of such convictions, and where the faculty of hope is
atrophied there we inevitably find signs of stagnation
and decay. Coleridge once said that the best physician
is he who can best inspire hope, and much is effected
when they who go out to serve are filled with the spirit
of confident expectancy.
There is a sense of hopeful and healthy good spirits
in the account of an itinerating tour that was under-
taken for the extension of medical work in the Karnal
district in the spring of 1 904. Miss May, a hospital
evangelist, thus described the experiences of a camping
expedition taken with Dr. Mabel Stevenson. " Our
advance into the village was an impressive sight and not
easily forgotten. As we approached one of our men
donned a certain red leather belt much belettered, and
grasping a long stick, his head held high, and with a
general air of importance, marched on in front, this
being their idea of impressing the multitude ! At a
considerable distance followed the bullock cart — a
queer straw-sided thing, piled to overflowing with our
not too aristocratic belongings — a heterogeneous collec-
LEPERS HAVING FEET DRESSED AT JERCHERLA. DISPENSARY HUT
IN BACKGROUND
DISPENSARY TENT, KARNAL DISTRICT
THE DAWN OF HOPE 61
tion of bundles of bedding, bags, tin tubs and buckets,
tent poles, and so forth. . . . One thought with a smile
of friends in Piccadilly! On the top was perched
Phcebe, the little native nurse, like a presiding genius
in pink and white, grasping the money-bag. Behind
came the three men, and the two Miss Sahibs brought
up the rear, hot and dusty — a fitting wind-up ! By
the time the camping ground was fixed on, all the
village knew that the 'Sahibs' had arrived, and we
were surrounded by a large and curious crowd of
brown-legged men and boys, come to see the ' tamasha '
(show or performance) for that is what we were to them
The first excitement was to watch the foreigners, and
the natives squatted down before us in crowded rows
while the tents were put up and food was eaten, until
at last they were hunted away by Miss Stevenson's
Christian servant, a magnificent giant in a red waistcoat
with a face and a laugh that did one good. . . . Then
to sleep with the sound of the village in our ears, for
every village rouses up at night and there was much
beating of tom-toms ' to wake the god,' and the boys
were singing their queer rhythmic songs in preparation
for a Hindu festival, and the dogs were, as usual,
howling.
" It had been too late to go and spy out the land in
the evening, so, after breakfast and prayers with our
two Christian helpers, we wandered round the village
lanes that are always carpeted with generations of
straw and sugar canes, in search of the women. One
or two vanished round corners as we appeared, for
they thought we were ' Sahibs ' as petticoats are no
62 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
guide. At last by a sudden turn we came to close,
quarters, something seemed to tell them that we didn't
bite and they half-uncovered their faces and then one
beckoned to us saying, "Ajao" = come. The ice was
broken and we went up an outside flight of steps and
on to a roof. More women were there, and on roofs
beyond still more appeared to join us, till there was
quite a crowd ; and then a charpoi (bed) was brought and
we sat down. When the doctor was discovered many
tales of woe were poured into her willing ears, so I left
her with the first group and moved on to make friends
elsewhere. Then in a courtyard a catechism would
begin : ' How old are you ? ' ' Are you married ? ' ' Why
not? ' ' Is the other one your sister? ' — the relation-
ship always puzzles the people ; sometimes I was Miss
Stevenson's mother, sometimes she was mine, once
we were husband and wife ! ' But if you don't do
cures, why are you here ? ' This brought one to the
point and my book of sacred pictures was produced.
Many listened eagerly, especially to the story of the
Babe of Bethlehem, and then leading on from the
mother's love for her child — the one real motive
power in these sad women's lives — I could tell them
of the Saviour's love for His lost children.
" After a morning's work in a village or by the tents
it is always difficult to ferret out the doctor. She was
hard at work practically from morning till night see-
ing about 500 people in the fortnight and performing
many operations. When you got a glimpse of her
through the crowd she would be generally sitting just
inside the tent with one grimy lady claf >ing one ankle
THE DAWN OE HOPE 63
and perhaps two holding the other, and all eyes riveted
on her face as she prescribes for one or examines the
eyes of another. The dispensary was undoubtedly the
key to the situation and opened the door to any teach-
ing we managed to give the women. The doctor and
her work were a witness to our genuine wish to help
them, and often in talking to both men and women
supplied a parable which appealed to them as strongly
as anything could. ' They that are whole need not a
physician, but they that are sick.' And surely the
doctor's unfailing sympathy and patience, the skilled
and tender hand, and the love which they must have
felt was the mainspring of it all, will come back to
them now as testimony to the truth of teaching which
they only dimly understood.
" The humours of the dispensary were many. There
was one old lady who came to see the doctor ; it was
impossible to discover her malady — she seemed to
have none. At last the truth came out — ' I want an
English pin ! ' and off she went in triumph.
" It was striking that in almost every village there
was one man who seemed, as it were, to be waiting
for us — ' There shall meet you a man '. In one it
was the village carpenter (and this was in a place
where the men were very hostile) who took me to his
shed, and having called his cronies brought out the
tribal hookah, and begged me to join in smoking
it — a great honour — then said, ' Now open your book
and teach us '. He had heard the teaching of the
women in the morning. Women and children grouped
themselves about among the shavings, no one saying
64 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
them nay, for apparently the master of the house is
absolute in his own domain, and they all listened in-
tently to the story of the Carpenter of Nazareth.
" Another time it was the village munshi who begged
me to go and teach his wife and children, or the head-
man as in Bala. He was perhaps the most interesting
person we met ; a tall man with a fine thoughtful face,
who had evidently read and thought much — a real
' seeker after God '. Sitting under a tree by the tents,
with an audience of about a hundred men, we talked
for two hours, this man asking many thoughtful
questions. . . . When the meeting broke up, he asked
for a quiet talk some other time, and on going to his
house in the afternoon, to my surprise he had collected
an enormous audience of women. 'Speak to them,
Miss Sahib; they can't come to you, I can.' He
came the next morning with some twenty more and
we had a long talk under our tree. When preparing
to go some exclaimed, * Go on, tell us more '. But
the head-man sllen, M.B., vaccinated over
2000, and by so doing successfully stamped out a bad
±
4 i
i
Jr
"^
*
e'^am
* «s
THE CARE OF PUBLIC HEALTH 75
Outbreak of smallpox in her district. In Hazaribagh
the mission carried out a campaign against the mos-
quitoes with the object of diminishing malaria and
attained some success. In Africa the medical missions
have been eager to work with the London School of
Tropical Medicine, and Dr. A. R. Cook and his brother,
Dr. J. H. Cook of the Church Missionary Society have
long been co-operating with the Government doctors
in the C.M.S. Hospital at Mengo in experiments
with an injection called "atoxyl," a preparation of
arsenic used in the campaign against sleeping sickness.
Cholera is ever present, and so long as the people of
the East drink from the stagnant ponds and live in a
squalor that defies description, it is likely enough to
continue. It is unfortunately a disease that develops
with great rapidity and unless help is immediately
forthcoming it is of little avail. In the autumn of
1908 cholera attacked the valley of Kalasapad. Hun-
dreds of cholera pills were promptly manufactured in
the small dispensary as they had proved to be of con-
siderable value if taken immediately after the appear-
ance of the first symptoms. Arrangements were made
with the senior mission agents and village teachers
for the distribution of the supply and the necessary
instructions were given. These apparently simple
remedies did much to allay panic and as a matter of
fact the Christians suffered very little in the epidemic.
This certainly witnesses to considerable initiative in a
small medical mission the whole expenses of which,
including the salaries of the hospital assistant and
assistant compounder, only come to £66 a year.
76 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
From New Guinea we can draw an illustration of
work in a dysentery camp. Nurse Combley writes in
a letter dated 20 April, 191 1, from Dogura: —
"I have had a truly heavy time since my return
from Lake Kamu. Dysentery has been rife in Wedau.
The people put up camps between Konbara and
Dogura on the flat, and there I nursed them. I never
want to see dysentery again, there is no orderly, and
isolation work is such rough, heavy work. I had got
to my last patient when the storm (on 27 March)
came. I was completely in the dark (and very dark
it was) for hours with the patient, holding on to the
thatched roof to keep him covered. It would have
been impossible to have got up the hill to Dogura in
the storm. At last we were blown out, and I decamped
to another little place, where we had a few square
inches of dry ground until daylight." A priest work-
ing in the same part adds in another letter, "... daily
also I have washed the sores of all who came ; it was
a bit against the grain at first, but I had the materials
and some slight knowledge, and so I did not think it
right to refuse when they came and expected it ".
Plague ! The very word conjures up the thought
of the Black Death that swept over England in 1348,
with a death-rate that is supposed to have reached
four million. Or we seem to see the dead cart in
1665, as it passed up and down the narrow streets
with the accompanying cry, "Bring out your dead,"
followed by the furtive, terrified opening of the door
that was marked by the red cross and the "Lord,
have mercy ".
THE CARE OF PUBLIC HEALTH 77
But from these distant memories we pass to the
plague as we know it to-day in India or China, a
visitation that depopulates and ravages vast tracts of
country until it is no wonder that the natives decide that
it must be left like a fire to burn itself out. Yet it is
being fought back inch by inch, step by step by men
and women who have been ready to run every risk, and,
if need be, to lay down their lives as victims of the
plague for their fellow-men. Science and religion
pride themselves equally in this noble army of martyrs,
who have gone forth to their work as Ambroise Pare
bade men go in 1 568 in his " Book of the Plague ".
"Above all things they must remember that they
are called of God to this vocation . . . therefore they
should go to it with a high courage, free of all fear,
having firm faith that God both gives and takes away
our lives as and when it pleases Him : but, as I have
said before, they must not neglect and despise preser-
vative remedies, or we should be plainly guilty of in-
gratitude since God has given them to us, having done
all things for our good."
Such men and women have their reward.
From 1 902 to 1 904 plague was raging in Cawnpore
chiefly owing to the insanitary condition of the native
quarters, and Miss Wynne Edwards, M.D., the senior
doctor, and Dr. Alice Marval, the junior doctor, were
kept busily employed, and in the earlier days of the
epidemic the proportion of recoveries was good. " As
we go through the lanes," wrote Miss Marval, " we are
constantly stopped and implored to go in and see some
one who is ill. When we reach the house the friends
7 8 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
and relations often fall down before us and touch our
feet with their foreheads and clasp their hands and pray
to us to ' give good medicine ' for they are poor people,
they have only God in Heaven and us on earth and if
we do this our name will be great from here to Luck-
now. ... In one house there was a young man dying
and delirious and his old parents kept imploring me
to give " good medicine " to stop the delirium. It would
be difficult to exaggerate the dirt and insanitariness of
the houses, moreover the sick people are often not
allowed to take any medicine until after the fever has
lasted three days for fear of ' driving it in '." Miss
Wynne Edwards also wrote: "Plague is very bad.
Miss Marval happens to be at present outside doctor
(they took it in turns so far as possible to do the
' outside ' and ' inside ' work), and has to spend four or
five hours a day in the city." Before these letters
reached England the sad news had come of Miss
Marval's death on 4 January, 1904, to be followed by
that of Miss Walden the English nurse on 19 January,
and a few days later by the deaths of Phulmani and
Nancy, two native assistants.
During the year 1905 there was a severe outbreak
of plague in Delhi, when four of the native Christian
nurses volunteered for plague duty, and thus proved
the reality of their Faith by undertaking work that
the lowest caste can only be made to do under com-
pulsion.
In the spring of 1907 there was another bad out-
break in Delhi. "There can hardly be anything
more depressing," wrote Miss Miiller, " than living
THE CARE OF PUBLIC HEALTH 79
in a plague-stricken city. The streets are almost
entirely deserted, rows and rows of houses are shut up,
and all day long, till one's heart and ears ache with the
sound, the funeral cry of the Hindus is heard as they
carry their dead down to the river. . . . From long
custom it has become a prerogative of the poor and
low caste to claim the clothes and even the bed in
which their higher-caste neighbours happen to die.
In addition to being infected they are usually in an
incredibly filthy condition, so that it is not surprising
that, with other causes, it is so difficult to deal with
epidemics in India. . . . For more than two months
we went out every day visiting the poor sufferers. . . .
We were usually hard at work for four or five hours,
going from hut to hut, washing and cleaning up the
sick, attending to the babies, administering medicines,
leaving behind with much explanation enough for
the next twenty-four hours, arranging for food and
milk, beseeching the people to bring out their filthy
accumulation of rags, burning them ourselves, disin-
fecting their houses, haranguing and cajoling them to
come and be inoculated, and often returning home with
some in the carriage. The sorrow and suffering and
general helplessness which one saw were truly heart-
rending ; all business was at a standstill, no wages
could be earned, for those who were well were attend-
ing to those who were ill, themselves to become victims
very likely in a day or two.''
The history of the plague in Manchuria is of such
recent interest that we may quote rather fully from
Dr. Aspland's account of his experiences. He had
80 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
been working for some time at a hospital which the
S.P.G. helped to support, and when the call came for
volunteers he left Peking and journeyed by rail to
Harbin, where the Chinese Government had been
forced to take action under threat of political interfer-
ence from Russia. The medical college of Peking
had been appealed to and three of the staff promptly
volunteered for work.
Dr. Aspland writes : —
"My experience commenced after the epidemic had
already broken out in the Chinese city of Harbin, and
although there had been deaths daily for over two
months, the death-rate had not exceeded 200 a day
until about the middle of January. . . . After a day
or two spent in the purchase of heavy clothing, etc.
(the temperature in January is considerably below zero)
we settled down in our new home, which consisted of
a third-class Siberian railway-car, uncushioned and
bare, but thereby more sanitary and more easily disin-
fected. Our car was on a siding about half a mile
from the Chinese city. It was with something of the
feeling of a man going into action for the first time
that I made my way to our chief inspecting station in
the centre of the city. At that time no military cordon
had been formed, and the duties of the police were only
feebly carried out, so that, as strangers, we were not
made to show passes. As we neared the city we
saw a dead man by the roadside ; a little further on,
another ; a little later, a man leaning against the
side of a house coughing up bloody expectoration,
and, as we found out, such a case would be dead in
TAKING A PATIENT TO THE PLAGUE HOSPITAL, HARBIN, N. CHINA
A CORNER IN THE PLAGUE HOSPITAL, HARBIN, N. CHINA
THE CARE OP PUBLIC HEALTH 3t
a few hours. Inside the city most of the shops were
closed, and the usually crowded thoroughfares were
almost empty, except for those engaged in plague
work. . . .
" The anti-plague organization had, up to this time,
been entirely in the hands of the local officials and
Chinese quacks, who were reporting great cures from
needling and blood-letting ; the death-rate all the time
was mounting up by leaps and bounds, so that the
daily total on both sides of the railway was 300. With
us arrived about twenty Chinese doctors, trained in
Western medicine, and thirty senior students from our
medical colleges. The head of the bureau was Dr.
Wu, a Cambridge man and a British subject, and in
his absence I assumed control. The Government sent
up 1 100 soldiers, whom we used to establish a cordon
round the entire city, and our 800 police were used to
form a cordon round the four sections into which the
city was divided. By a system of badges and passes
no person was allowed to go from one station to an-
other. With soldiers, police, and 600 sanitary coolies,
we were enabled, when work was in full swing, to visit
every house in the city daily, and search for sick and
dead. Each of the four sections had its disinfecting
station, sanitary station, and plague hospital, whilst
outside the city was the large quarantine station. Our
quarantine station consisted of a hundred railway
trucks, each capable of holding about twenty 'con-
tacts,' fitted with wooden bunks and heated with a
central stove. Further, we had a suspect hospital for
thirty people, a plague hospital for a similar number,
82 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
a disinfecting building, besides kitchens and adminis-
trative buildings for our crowd which some days num-
bered about 1800. The whole of this number had
to be examined daily by us two doctors and our five
students, and we can congratulate ourselves that our
death-rate was never more than thirty a day, and our
total deaths not more than 5 per cent. In pneumonic
plague the infection is carried by coughing, it being
necessary to take the infective material into the lungs,
and after an incubation of from two to five days, there
is bloody expectoration, and death follows in not more
than twenty-four hours. A great many of the septi-
cemic cases, who had no cough or lung affection, would
be quite well, laughing and talking, when we made our
rounds in the morning, and in the evening would be
on the dead heap. We have never known a single re-
covery, and in hundreds of cases the rapidity of the
disease was astounding.
" Finding it impossible to dig graves, because of the
severe frost, we had finally to burn the bodies. A
large pit twenty feet square, and ten feet deep was
blasted with dynamite, and into this about 400 bodies,
some in coffins and others not, would be piled ; then,
when sprayed with about forty gallons of paraffin,
they burned rapidly and completely to ashes. The
simplicity of the process can be judged by the fact that
we burnt over 3000 in one day. The epidemic is now
over and the death roll was only 60,000 instead of
devastating, as we had feared, the millions of North
China." Dr. Aspland attended the International
Plague Conference at Mukden where nearly fifty dele-
THE CARE OF PUBLIC HEALTH 83
gates from different countries studied the problems
of pneumonic plague for over a month, and he had the
honour of acting as delegate for China, and of being
appointed the Medical Secretary of the Conference,
while his work at Harbin was alluded to in glowing
terms in a speech from the throne.
Besides the Russian and Chinese doctors, the hospi-
tal assistants and coolies who lost their lives in this
epidemic, the United Free Church of Scotland lost a
brilliant young medical missionary, Dr. A. F. Jackson.
The Chinese Viceroy, Hsi Liang, made a speech at the
memorial service held in Mukden in grateful recogni-
tion of Dr. Jackson's work.
" He went forth to help us in our fight ; daily where
the pestilence lay thickest, amidst the groans of the
dying, he struggled to ease the stricken, to find medicine
to stay the evil. Worn by his efforts the pestilence
seized upon him, and took him from us long ere his time.
. . . O spirit of Dr. Jackson, we pray you to intercede
for the twenty million people in Manchuria and ask the
Lord of Heaven to take away this pestilence so that
we may once more lay our heads in peace upon our
pillows. In life you were brave, in death you are an
exalted spirit. Noble spirit who sacrificed your life for
us, help us still and look down in kindness upon us all."
The latest medical work undertaken by Dr. Aspland
has been in the Chinese revolution. He left Peking
with his wife to undertake Red Cross work amongst
the Imperial troops, but as their wounded were being
well cared for in Hankow he crossed the Wuchang
river to attend the revolutionary force. " Our hospital
84 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
is an industrial institute and in it we have 250 wounded,
and a daily attendance of about a hundred who come
to be dressed, but are not bad enough to be taken in.
Oh ! the misery of war . . . the only thing we can
say is that we are doing the best we can. Each
patient is lying in his clothes just as he left the battle-
field. . . . Some have never taken their puttees off,
and though in bed for a month there is no arrange-
ment for bathing and washing ; and sometimes in the
wards, rising above the odours necessarily accompany-
ing so many suppurating wounds, is the dominating
one of chickens, ducks, and pork being roasted over a
charcoal brazier by some kind friend for a wounded
relation or patriot."
After this experience with the revolutionaries Dr.
Aspland was again transferred to the Imperial forces.
"The condition of the wounded here is much
worse than at Wuchang, for, as it is here more of the
nature of guerilla warfare, the modern bullet is not
used, but a big lead one which makes ghastly wounds.
Further, in a neighbourhood like this, where beggars
are so numerous, a man with an amputated arm or
leg will almost invariably starve ; the patients refuse
amputation, and, after weeks of laborious dressings
and attendance, die of prolonged suppuration and
exhaustion. So far we are safe, and trust to continue
so, but have been a little uneasy because fifty miles
from here the brigands entered a Red Cross hospital,
robbed it, and shot three patients. But we are still
barricaded, and nothing but a very determined force
could get in."
mm:
THE CARE OF PUBLIC HEALTH 85
At the outbreak of the South African War, Dr.
Booth (afterwards Dean of Umtata), a qualified doctor,
started ambulance classes for the Indian Community
in Durban, being helped in this by Mr. Gandhi, the
well-known Hindu barrister. When the Government
raised an Indian Bearer corps of 600 coolies they were
anxious to find men who were capable of taking com-
mand and who could speak both English and Hindus-
tanee. This was work for which the ambulance class
proved specially suited, and they volunteered for service
with Dr. Booth as their medical officer, only stipulating
that they should receive no pay. They were rewarded
with the Queen's medal with clasps for services rendered
at Colenso and Spion Kop.
In many cases the missionary has been able to in-
augurate sanitary reform ; the Rev. W. L. Beard of
the American Board in Foochow obtained permission
to start a street cleaning corps, and during a visitation
of plague at Amoy the native Christians cleansed and
disinfected their own homes and prepared leaflets for
distribution that others might follow their example.
Perhaps this is a cause of the remarkable immunity of
the Christians in times of epidemic as compared with
other natives. This is noticed in all mission stations,
so that a Turkish official once exclaimed, " How is it,
O ye Christians; has God spread His tent over you
that you are spared?" In a recent official Health
Report from Bombay the mortality among low caste
Hindus and Mohammedans are 52-95 and 45 - 93 per
1000, among native Christians only 875. This seems
truly to bear out by unmistakable evidence that the
86 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
Christian Faith does allay fear, depression, and hope-
lessness and marks an undeniable advance in the
health of the community. But if such an advance
is to be maintained, it must be followed by careful,
systematic, and Christian training.
VII.
TEACHING AND TRAINING.
THE most important part of the work of the medical
missionary lies in the training of native assistants
whether as doctors, compounders, anaesthetists, or
nurses, for the object of the missionary must be to
leave a native school of medicine when eventually
western help may be withdrawn. It has not always
been easy for the medical missionaries to carry out their
own ideals and theory of training, for the overworked
doctor of a mission station is so beset by patients,
sick calls, and the need for immediate operations that
he has no spare time for lectures or demonstrations.
Yet, as Dr. Aspland reminds us, it is essential that
missions should take a principal part in this work in
order to maintain the highest ideals of self-sacrifice as
well as those of the latest modern research and technical
skill, so that the medical service may be founded on a
tradition that is God-fearing, pure, and single-hearted.
It is well to think of what such a tradition has meant
in England, and we may contrast it with the fact that
Mrs. Bishop was asked no less than 200 times during
her travels for drugs to injure a favourite wife by
others in the harem.
(87)
88 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
Dr. Aspland writes : " If you want to help China,
now is the time. The rapid advance of all kinds of
science, introduced by various nations, unassociated
with any religious teaching, makes us fear that China
may develop some of the good qualities of modern
civilization without the inner spiritual life, in which case
her civilization will be dead and empty. The responsi-
bility rests with missions. At present ' medicine ' is
the only art associated with distinctly religious and
missionary influence, and even this is threatened. Tre-
mendous efforts are being made by other missionary
bodies to keep this one door open, so that, by the
establishment of medical schools, we can be assured
that the Chinese doctors of the future shall be taught
their profession from a standard far above that of
commercialism. ' Know ye not that your body is the
Temple of the Holy Ghost? ' "
It is unlikely that any one missionary society could
found and endow such a medical school as Dr.
Aspland indicates, but a movement has already been
made to group various societies together for this pur-
pose. Many qualifications are now required to gain
Government recognition and to keep up the prestige
of teaching, so that there must be a large and com-
petent staff, sufficient and well-equipped laboratories,
and a continuity that will remain unbroken notwith-
standing the furloughs, the outlying and district cases,
and the possibilities of personal ill-health. The C.M.S.
have already grouped the various branches of their own
work in the Medical School at Foochow, but the
college that at present most nearly approximates to
TEACHING AND TRAINING 89
the standard aimed at is the Union Medical College in
Peking. It was originally started by the American
Board, the American Presbyterians and the London
Missionary Society, and it has since been joined by the
North China Mission of the English Church and the
Medical Missionary Association of London. It con-
sists of two large buildings, one containing class-rooms,
laboratories and so forth, and the other comprising
the students' dormitories ; it is hoped that a hospital
and dispensary may soon be added. There are fourteen
members of the Faculty and eight lecturers ; Dr.
Aspland is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at
the college.
The American Church opened a medical school in
Shanghai and this has been taken over by the
Harvard University Medical School and will aim at
teaching Hygiene and Public Health, and members of
the staff have been drawn from the medical missions.
This method of working in a central school is not un-
known to us at home, for it has been employed by
those London Hospitals who do not possess a large
medical school of their own. Hostels and residential
colleges could develop round such a central school,
where the strong personal influence and the religious
teaching, which is of the utmost importance, would
not be wanting; but in any case the atmosphere of
the school itself would be absolutely Christian, as
would the principles, the method, and the inspiration
of the work.
This suffices to illustrate a movement that has
taken effect at Beirut and in India, as well as in China,
9 o THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
and which should help more than anything else in
the strengthening, recognition, and usefulness of the
medical missions.
Christians are already taking a place out of all pro-
portion to their numbers in educational and medical
work. In June, 1 908, the first Corean doctors took their
degrees at the Severance Hospital Medical College
in Seoul, and all were Christians ; and it is an in-
teresting fact that within eleven years of the Enabling
Act that admitted the first Englishwomen to medical
degrees, a Chinese Christian lady, Miss You Me Kying,
had entered the Women's Medical School in New
York and had graduated at the head of her class.
Another Chinese Christian lady, Dr. Hii King Eng,
was asked in 1899 to accept the position of physician
to the household of His Excellency Li Hung Chang ;
her skill was so great that she was known throughout
China as " the Miracle Lady ". The first Indian lady
to enter the medical profession was also a Chris-
tian, Mrs. Satthianadhan, better known perhaps as
Krupabai ; and for that matter the first Indian women
to graduate in arts and law have also been Christians.
The training of nurses must not be overlooked, and
it is by no means easy to get the steady habits of
regular work into the minds of girls who have hitherto
only been brought up with a view to very early
marriage. In most hospitals the nurses are under
agreement to stay for a certain term of years if they
are considered suitable. At the end of the term they
usually marry and the hospital authorities must con-
tent themselves with the thought that they will found
TEACHING AND TRAINING 91
purer, cleaner, and healthier homes and be more useful
and dependable wives and mothers on account of their
training.
Dr. Dawson from St. Catharine's, Cawnpore, writes
that they come to the hospital at the mature age of
sixteen and are mere school-girls with no idea of what
nursing means, yet in two years the English nurses
are often able to make sensible women and trained
nurses out of them. They are a constant source of
anxiety, yet their different characters and their unex-
pected ways of developing and an unlooked-for aptitude
for their work adds much to the interest of hospital
life. Very few of them take any pleasure in the theo-
retical part of their work, but there are of course excep-
tions. One dispenser gave herself up entirely to the
study of pharmacy, and for a whole year she could
scarcely be separated from a copy of the "British
Pharmacopoeia," even keeping the large red book under
her pillow at night. At the end of that time she was
found in great distress because she had learnt it all, and
was weeping like Alexander that there was nothing
more to conquer. However the kindly authorities
suggested that she should turn her attention to learning
English, of which she knew not a word, and the little
nurse was comforted. In contras t to this, another young
nurse from the same hospital seemed unable to learn
anything during her first six months, but developed
an extraordinary love and attraction for pets of all
descriptions which she always carried about with her.
Young squirrels and birds would peep out from her
garments in the most disconcerting manner, kittens
92 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
doomed to death had a way of disappearing into secret
hiding-places until all danger was over, when they would
reappear to add to the crowd of unwished-for animals
already attached to the hospital.
A description from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Karnal,
will show us how the most unlikely material may be
used for the glory of God and for the good of their fellow-
creatures. " Now let us turn to watch the nurse who is
teaching a young probationer how to lift a crippled
girl. She has a quiet face, seamed and lined, but
hardly attractive ; but she is the mainstay of the
hospital staff, ready for any emergency and eager to
take upon herself the most arduous tasks and the most
menial duties. ' Gently Premi ! ' she is saying, ' if
you hurry you will hurt her. So ! that is better,' — then
to the patient : ' How do I know so well what to do ?
I was once ill like you in hospital. Then God cured
me, body and soul, and taught me to know and love
Himself. Now He lets me spend my days in helping
others.' True ! for ten years ago she was an ignorant
Brahmin villager, carried into the hospital crippled by
rheumatism. Now she is head nurse, one of the most
faithful witnesses for Christ in the whole congregation,
loved and respected throughout the city. Premi, the
probationer, was once a little outcast child, a famine
orphan ; now she is on her way to become a useful
and self-supporting Christian woman."
From St. Luke's Hospital, Chemulpo, we learn some-
thing of the difficulty of nursing in a hospital that
has not been adequately staffed with European nurses.
Night work is a special difficulty as it does not follow
iS^__A.
CONSULTING ROOM, KARNAL. DR. SCOTT, OUT-PATIENTS AND NURSES
BIBLEWOMAN TEACHING PATIENTS WAITING TO SEE THE DOCTOR, KARNAL
TEACHING AND TRAINING 93
that the native nurse will be prepared to stay awake all
night, even if he is allowed to sleep by day, and he
will willingly accept the post and the responsibility and
sleep peacefully until he is found out. As a rule
whenever there is a patient requiring a great deal of
attention a friend will stay with him through the night,
and if need arise he can call the boy who sleeps in
the ward and send him to fetch the doctor. The idea
of women nurses for the men's ward was quite op-
posed to native ideas, and the prejudice has only been
gradually overcome.
Besides the work of training and teaching which is
extending rapidly wherever men and money are forth-
coming, the missionary associations have been forward
in translating and preparing medical literature. In
1889, for instance, a medical handbook was published
for the Karens in their own language under the direc-
tion of Dr. Strachan, Bishop of Rangoon, a qualified
doctor. The Chinese Medical Missionary Association
is active in calling meetings in the various branches
for discussion of medical and surgical problems and
questions of administration, and for the comparison of
experience. They have published tracts and pamphlets
on sanitation, on the treatment of epidemic disease, and
on the care of health and kindred subjects, which have
been widely distributed especially during outbreaks of
illness; and they have lately compiled an English-
Chinese medical dictionary containing 1 5,000 medical
terms, the names of diseases and various other medical
and surgical subjects. This association which repre-
sents a department of Christian service in which
94 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
theological divisions are not felt, would extend the
work of translation and the preparation of Chinese
medical books only that it is difficult to set apart busy
men for such work and to find the necessary funds. It is
largely on this account that the missionaries have been
unable to do much research work in the investigation
of local illness and epidemics. When we learn that
the C.M.S. medical missions, scattered as they are in
various parts of the world, have an annual attendance
of 1,162,972 patients and a staff of only ninety doctors
— men and women — and but fifty-six English nurses,
we may realize that there is not much opportunity for
anything beyond the arduous work of active practice.
The S.P.G. has a considerably smaller staff consisting
of thirty-three doctors and fifteen English nurses, but
these, with the medical missions of the University
Mission to Central Africa, and the Church of England
Zenana Missionary Society, represent the largest
medical mission sent into the field by any one com-
munion.
These are some of the foundations that are being
laid with such patience and self-effacement by the
medical missionaries. Their time seems often wasted
by the much serving of tables, and a description given
by Dr. Livingstone, one of the greatest of medical mis-
sionaries, of all that is expected of the harassed and
overworked doctor, may not be inaptly applied to his
successors.
" A Jack-of-all-trades, he is building houses and
schools, cultivating gardens, scheming in every manner
to get water, which in the remarkable drought of the
TEACHING AND TRAINING 95
season becomes scarcer and scarcer ; as a missionary
he is holding meetings every other night, preaching on
Sundays, and taking such other opportunities as he
can find to gain the people to Christ ; as a medical
man he is dealing with the more difficult cases of
disease, those which baffle the native doctors; as a
man of science he is taking observations, collecting
specimens, thinking out geographical, geological,
meteorological and other problems bearing on the
structure and condition of the continent ; as a mis-
sionary statesman he is planning how the actual force
might be disposed of to most advantage, and is looking
round in this direction and in that, over hundreds of
miles, for openings for native agents ; and to promote
these objects he is writing long letters to the Direc-
tors, to the ' Missionary Chronicle,' to the ' British
Banner,' to private friends, to anyone likely to take
an interest in his places."
And to all these studies there must be added the
necessity of learning not only one new language but
the many dialects in order that the common people
may hear and understand.
And these men turning their hands thus willingly
to humble tasks are, as Sir F. Champneys, M.D.,
F.R.C.P., has told us, "not men who found a difficulty
in passing their examinations, or men who had wasted
their time, or men of no particular force in the
hospital, . . . but prizemen, men who were interested
in everything they saw and did ".
VIII.
SOME S.P.G. HOSPITALS.
The first medical missionary of the Church of Eng-
land was the Rev. F. T. McDougall, Fellow of the
Royal College of Surgeons, afterwards Bishop of
Labuanand Sarawak, who landed in Borneo in 1848.
He quickly recognized the value of medicine in
missionary work. " If I had not had the excuse of
my medical capacity, I should never have been able
to get into the people's houses and gain their con-
fidence as I have done." There, amid the mixed
population of Dyaks, Malays, and Chinese, the work
has gone on but not without grave reverses for lack
of men and money. There are two races of the
Dyaks, the Sea Dyaks who live by fishing near the
sea or on the banks of the rivers, and the Land Dyaks
further up in the interior of the country. They are
short, wiry little people, capable of enduring much
fatigue and they live in long houses raised from the
ground by poles in which several families, sometimes
as many as thirty or forty, congregate under the head-
ship of one man. In 1904 Mrs. Dexter Allen, M.B.,
started work at Banting in the jungle, almost on the
borders of Dutch Borneo, and on the Batang Lupar
(96)
HOSPITALS 97
River. The mission station is on a hill 200 feet
high, and as it is reached by a steep path that ends
in a 30-foot ladder up the face of the rock, it is not
very easy of access, especially for invalids who are more
or less seriously ill. In 1905 the Rajah authorized the
building of a cottage hospital, and it was duly built of
iron-wood tarred outside and whitewashed inside.
"The Dyaks are very pleased with it," wrote Mrs.
Dexter Allen when it was first opened ; " already it
has five inmates, and we know that many people will
come when they hear there is a building with every
convenience for them. It is all crudely simple, but
as they sleep on the floor and bring their own mats
with them, very little furniture is required." There,
amid the luxuriant trees, the quiet work of healing
goes on, and the natives gather round the " black but
comely" little house, the men, with their big hats, or
bright-coloured handkerchiefs tied turban-wise round
their heads, chewing the betel nut which is part of a
Dyak's equipment and is kept in a small pouch round
his neck ; the women, gay with brass ornaments, and
usually hatless unless they have been working in the
rice fields.
From Borneo to South Africa is a far cry, but not
long after the medical mission was started in Borneo
the Rev. H. Callaway, a fully qualified doctor, went
to South Africa and soon found ample opportunity for
exercising his medical knowledge. Like Dr. McDougall
he was also destined to continue his work as Bishop of
the diocese, and very soon after his promotion to the
newly-formed see of St. John's, Kaffraria, he built a
7
98 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
small hospital at Umtata. Umtata is nearly 1400
feet above sea level, and another 1400 feet above
it, some fifteen miles distant, we come to Tsolo, a
small village of about 1 50 people mostly European
but forming with the outlying districts a good centre
for work among the Pondomisi. It lies high on the
veld, rough green grass all around and innumerable
sheep and goats scattered over the sunny downs.
Here and there the wood smoke from some alfresco
feast rises in the clear air, or some little black children
innocent of all clothing scamper across the open, or
again the black and white crows rise against the
wonderful blue sky and a tall stork flaps slowly away
with red legs and bill shining in the sun. Nine miles
to the south-west we come to the mission of St.
Cuthbert's, which lies among the hills, in a cup-
like hollow of the downs with its beautiful church
built and served by the Cowley Fathers. There, amid
groves of black wattle, eucalyptus, fig, apple, quince,
orange and lemon trees, we find St. Lucy's Hospital with
its resident doctor, Dr. McMurtrie, and the Sisters of St.
Mary's Community, Wantage, who, with two trained
nurses, undertake the nursing. This hospital receives
grants from the S.P.G.
In such pleasant surroundings it seems as if no one
could be ill, but the eight or ten beds are in constant
use, and now and again in an epidemic of " black fever "
space is badly needed. On New Year's Day, 1 910,
an ox was numbered among the patients, the owner
having brought it in some distress to be operated on
for tumour in the head. The man would take no
HOSPITALS 99
refusal and the operation was duly performed under
chloroform with such success that the animal trotted
home of its own accord on the following day — al-
together an unique experience in the work of a medical
mission.
Tsolo and St. Cuthbert's pass from our vision like a
dissolving view and are replaced by one of the oldest
S.P.G. Zenana Hospitals, St. Stephen's, Delhi. This
owes its origin to the faithful efforts of Priscilla Winter,
wife of an S.P.G. missionary, who, from 1863 onwards,
used to distribute simple remedies to the poor around
her and to nurse them through epidemics of fever and
cholera. Three years after her death in 1881 the
foundation stone of a permanent hospital was laid by
H.R.H. the Duchess of Connaught. The site chosen
was an important one, as the frontage was on the
Chandni Chauk, the busy thoroughfare that leads from
the Lahore Gate to the Palace. But it was not really
suitable for hospital work as the site was very much
cramped, necessitating a building of three storeys with
steep and awkward staircases, beside being very noisy.
The Hindu Temple next door was sufficiently disturb-
ing, every night and morning the god had to be put to
sleep and awakened, and although it seemed to wake
without very much trouble it took an unconscionable
time going to sleep. Sometimes the foghorns, drums,
bells, whistles, and lutes would be making merry from
6 p.m. till 1 a.m., by which time if the god slept,
the doctors and patients were usually wide awake.
It was a great relief when the site was sold and
the hospital removed to another site, offered by the
ioo THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
Government just outside the city walls. The admir-
able new buildings were opened in 1906 with ac-
commodation for over fifty patients, an operating
theatre and out-patients' dispensary, a wing for the
nursing staff being added later. The chapel forms a
connecting link between this main building and the
bungalow for the medical staff. Two wards com-
memorate Mrs. Winter and Dr. Marie Hayes ; the latter
died from pneumonic plague in 1908, contracted from
one of the patients who had bitten her finger whilst
she was attending her. A third ward is named after
Dr. Annie Harding who died of dysentery. There are
now six lady doctors and four English and a number of
native nurses on the staff of St. Stephen's, Delhi, who
also have charge of the hospitals at Karnal and Rewari.
Karnal, on the railway between Delhi and Simla, is a
typical country town of North India numbering 25,000
inhabitants who crowd the tall brick and stucco houses
in the crooked streets, houses that seem only able to
stand up because they are so closely packed together.
Dr. Marcia Fishe thus described Karnal : " The city is
said to contain 20,000 people and 26,000 head of cattle.
About the former I am not sure, but I have met practi-
cally all of the latter when bicycling home after sunset
without a lamp. They troop out in the morning to
feed and back in the evening to sleep with their
owners. It is difficult enough to bicycle in the crowded
streets, and the only chance of getting along is to cry
out ' bachho bachho anewala ' (O man coming towards
me) or 'janewala' (O man going from me) or 'baki-
wala, bailwala ' (cow-driver, goat-driver) as occasion re-
HOSPITALS I6i
quires." Karnal is a walled city, and beyond there is a
growing suburb of shops and houses for working people,
the large market-place is always busy with many com-
ings and goings from the country, and is filled with
camel carts and ekkas. At one corner there is a large
enclosure surrounded by massive walls like a fortress,
it is approached by a picturesque gateway and on the
inner side there are many small huts and travellers'
rooms built into the wall. This is the ancient inn or
" serai," built many hundreds of years ago when Karnal
was an important city. It may still be a shelter in
time of need and in one sense it is that already, for
St. Elizabeth's Hospital, the first part of which was
finished in 1908, has been built within the walls taking
the place of the old hospital which had been practically
destroyed by earthquake in 1905. This disaster had
indeed disheartened the mission, but immediately after
the earthquake the Easter mail brought a letter from a
servant girl in England enclosing a postal order for a
shilling, and this humble and unsought gift came as a
message of hope and formed the nucleus for the ^3000
that was afterwards raised. The following account of
the move into the new hospital was written by Dr.
Scott in the " Delhi Mission News " :—
" I have been through many moves in England but
this one in India beats them all. It was very simple
and astonishingly cheap, expenses under £1. One
low cart with outsides drawn by the most patient pair
of bullocks imaginable (the only beings quite unruffled
by the whole transaction) took our furniture from the
old to the new place, some half dozen men loading at
102 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
one end, walking along by the cart and unloading at
the other. Four whole days this one cart went back-
wards and forwards, sometimes making only four
journeys, sometimes six in the day, the number depend-
ing on whether any other vehicle was encountered in
the narrow streets or not. To pass one another was
impossible, so the animals had to be unyoked, and the
cart pushed back and up the first side-alley. This
need not have delayed matters more than twenty
minutes, but it usually meant more than an hour, for
a long altercation must be carried on first by the re-
spective drivers as to which cart should be moved
back. That settled, more amicable talk ensues, and
also the inevitable hookah is produced and passed
round. Then the change is made, everybody in the
street standing by to watch, all suggesting and ex-
horting, encouraging and commiserating by turns as
they think best. Our luggage at last wends its slow,
bumpy way down the street, more than one table and
chair losing its legs in transit — the corners being so
sharp and the walls so overhanging. By Monday
(the day before the opening) we had the doctor's
house fairly straight, and were as much forward with
the hospital as possible. . . . Monday was a day to
remember. Quite a large number of out-patients had
to be seen for the last time in the old yard. Mean-
while the in-patients were deposited on old and make-
shift beds, the good ones being sent down in the cart
and put ready in the wards to receive their respective
inmates. Then processions were formed of patients
in carriages, patients on stretchers, patients with
g£§g§§gy f fc£g&2&f
I _ -
. -
.. ._ . . . ■■■■ ■ _: ■hd&*
3ULLOCK CART WITH PATIENTS LEAVING HOSPITAL COMPOUND, KAKNAL
DISPENSARY AND COMPOUNDER, ST. ELIZABETH'S HOSPITAL, KARNAL
HOSPITALS 103
babies and patients without. Then doctor and sister
and nurses, all with arms full of miscellaneous articles.
Each patient was armed with her own drinking vessel,
food-plate and bowl, comb and medicine-bottle. And
so the move was made. Darkness fell as we got our
last patient into bed in the new place, and our visitors
began to arrive from Delhi for the morrow's opening
ceremony. . . . Every one was most interested in
and enthusiastic about the place, its arrangements,
contrivances, the fresh cleanness of everything and the
happy-looking nurses and patients in their new clothes.
"One Mohammedan patient remarked quite spon-
taneously, 'Well, I believed I should see paradise
when I died, but here I see it alive '."
St. Catharine's Hospital, Cawnpore, presents an at-
tractive frontage to the street ; it is a handsome two-
storied building on one of the main thoroughfares out-
side the city, and deep flower-beds have been made
inside the walls flanking the great iron gate, through
which one may catch a glimpse of the grass and trees
within, while the verandah is covered with bright
creepers. The doorkeeper has strict orders never to
admit a man unless with very special permission, for
" purdah " is strictly observed. The hospital buildings
are connected with wide verandahs which are indeed
needed as a protection from the hot sun, and from the
terrific rains in the monsoon. Then it seems as if a
water-spout were descending from the sky turning all
the open spaces into swamps and ponds to the huge
delight of the innumerable small children who have to
be looked after during "mother's" illness. They en-
ro 4 The claim Of suffering
joy this improvised bathing infinitely more than the
bath that is made conditional to their admission into
the hospital, and which usually entails a vigorous
amount of howling and resistance. The wards as in
Delhi bear their loving witness to those who have
laid down their lives in the service of our Lord. Sir
William Cooper one of the English residents gave the
new buildings for the chapel and isolation ward in
memory of Dr. Alice Marval, Miss Elizabeth Walden,
and the two native assistants who lost their lives in the
plague of 1905, and an operating theatre was added
as a special memorial to Dr. Marval by her friends
and the members of the G.F.S. who had contributed
to her support. The staff at the present moment con-
sists of three lady doctors (including one for itinerating
work), two English and several native nurses.
Chemulpo. — The name is still associated in our minds
with the Russian-Japanese War, and it was evident that
St. Luke's Hospital was serving a worthy purpose when
it was turned into a hospital for the wounded Russian
soldiers by the Japanese Red Cross Society, more
especially as it had been originally built by Bishop
Corfe with funds subscribed by friends in our own
Royal Navy. It was unfortunate that at this critical
time there was no medical missionary in charge of the
hospital, but we can at least feel that our building was
of service. Come up the winding narrow lanes of
the old Corean town, for the foreign quarter lies on
the other side of St. Luke's, and there on the side
of the hill is the imposing "Tai Moon "or entrance
gate, a double door of wood hung in such a manner
ttOSflTALS ios
as to produce the maximum amount of squeaking.
The low thatched houses seem to creep up to the
gate like beggars at the door asking for help, and help
indeed there is for all behind the gateway. The
hospital is built on a long and narrow strip of ground
and forms three sides of an oblong. There is the men's
ward named in memory of Dr. Landis the first S.P.G.
medical missionary in Chemulpo, who used to entertain
the patients as his guests in true Corean fashion just
as Dr. Laws still does in Chin Chun. There is another
men's ward and an operating theatre as a memorial to
Bishop Corfe, the founder of the hospital and first
Bishop of the Diocese. A women's ward was added
in 1908, with a store-room and laundry tucked con-
veniently underneath, an arrangement made possible
by the different ground levels. The wards are simply
furnished to meet Corean taste, the bed made of
boards is raised on trestles with a straw mattress and
a sawdust pillow, and if the pillow is not stuffed very
tightly the patient will tie knots in the cover to make
it harder. Every patient is allowed two portions of
rice a day, but each portion would be sufficient for
three ordinary people ; and when the pickled cabbage
and turnip are being cooked in the ward to add relish
to the rice it is distinctly preferable to stay outside.
St. Luke's had the honour of tending Bishop Turner
for the seven weeks before his death ; he was brought
there utterly exhausted from overwork, and though
several of the doctors from Seoul came over to see if
more could be done he had not the strength to rally,
and so fell asleep in Christ.
io6 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
Not far from the town of Ping Yin, in North China,
and standing but little back from the road, there is the
memorial to Sydney Brooks, deacon, the first martyr
to fall in the dreadful Boxer Rising of 1 899. He was
hastening back to rejoin Mr. Matthews who was, as
he knew, alone and in great danger, when he himself
fell into the hands of the Boxers, who wounded him in
many places, stripped him of some of his clothes, and
dragged him from place to place until at last he fainted
from exhaustion and loss of blood. It was intensely
cold, and as he lay worn out with hunger and barely con-
scious, he heard his captors discussing his death. As
he had been unbound he managed to slip away in the
vain endeavour to escape, but was recaptured and be-
headed, his body being cast into a ravine near by.
Mr. Matthews was able to persuade the magistrate to
recover the body, and with his own hands he prepared
it for burial, then, notwithstanding the imminent
danger, it was committed to the grave, and all the
Christians of the neighbourhood took part in the
funeral. At the same time a poor old Roman Catholic
woman, a Chinese, was burnt to death ; thus Ping Yin
can claim the first European and the first Chinese
martyr to suffer at the hands of the Boxers. These
two witness to the essential unity of the Church, even
though at times difference of race and the diversity
of thought may seem to separate us. Here then is
holy ground for a hospital, and indeed when the St.
Stephen's Memorial Church was finished, the medical
mission which had formerly occupied a mud hut, was
able to move into the old church. Now it is well
HOSPITALS 107
housed in an admirable building planned by and built
under the personal direction of Dr. Margaret Phillips,
and its timely help is gratefully welcomed by the
people of Ping Yin. They are miserably poor, for
much of their prosperity left them when the turbulent
Yellow River chose out for itself a new channel, and
left the town to be subject to continual floodings from
the mountain streams. Working out from these large
and well-established hospitals there are various smaller
dispensaries and much itinerating medical work which
it is difficult to describe in detail. With strong centres
adequately staffed much more might be done, but the
Home organization is often obliged to discourage
extension through lack of money.
To turn to Colonial work, a medical mission has
been started on the smaller islands lying between
Vancouver and the mainland of British Columbia, by
the Rev. J. Antle, formerly an S.P.G. missionary, and
a hospital ship, the "Columbia," can ply between the
islands and pick up the patients in need of hospital
treatment, and so take them to one or other of the
three hospitals. The "loggers" are subject to many
accidents and to terrible temptations to drink, so that
wounds and illness are very prevalent, and until this
work was started there was no possibility of medical
attendance for these 3000 scattered people.
Criticism is a weapon easily used, but it would be
difficult to find fault with the expenses and upkeep of
a missionary hospital. The late Dr. Hearn of Hazari-
bagh, North India, published the details of such ex-
penditure a few years ago, and it was found that the
ioS THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
food for one day for thirteen persons cost is. 6|d.,
with 2^d. extra for fuel. When a new patient comes
to the hospital in Hazaribagh he is supplied with a
set of four cooking vessels, an earthen pot or harrhia
in which rice is boiled, a drinking vessel or chakka, a
dabri or plate, and a vessel for holding charcoal called
a patila. Thus the support of a patient, exclusive of
medicine, comes to about £$ 10s. a year, a sum that
can hardly be called excessive. In Corea the salary
allowed to each European worker is only £80 a year,
and yet we hear of them discussing economy and re-
trenchment with the greatest anxiety. It ought not
to be so, men and means should be forthcoming ; but
we need the spirit of the good Samaritan if the work
is to be placed on a surer footing, a spirit which not
only generously gives money for immediate need but
which is also ready to take future responsibility and
to repay gladly any debt incurred in ministering to
the sick.
IX.
AN APPEAL.
We have tried to show something of the work of a
great department that is covered by the general term
of " Missions," and now we would venture to press an
appeal for support The Inspector-General of Hos-
pitals in Bengal has estimated that 23,000 dispensaries
are urgently needed if we would establish one for every
3000 of the population of Bengal ; and there are, at
the present time, only 558 government dispensaries.
This would practically mean a staff of 23,000 doctors,
and even that would fall far short of the provision in
England where we have one doctor for every 1400 of
the population. According to Sir William Moore,
M.D., in an article in the "Asiatic Quarterly," medi-
cal relief in India has only reached 5 per cent of the
people, and as the work is largely limited to the towns
and centres of population, a vast proportion, 95 per
cent of the whole, and especially those who live in the
villages and outlying districts, are not touched. Even
in Calcutta the Health Officer after careful investigation
found that " 62 per cent of the persons who died in
that city received no medical attendance from any kind
of practitioner, qualified or unqualified, Western or
(109)
no THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
Eastern". Yet we have already gone far to make
these people realize their need, and a grave responsi-
bility rests upon us if we make no effort to satisfy it.
"If anyone seeth his brother in need and shutteth up
his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the
love of God in him ? "
Dr. James Macphail of the United Free Church of
Scotland Missionary Society, writing in " The East and
The West," from his large experience says : —
" To the possible extension of this work there seems
to be almost no limit. The people of India are just
beginning to feel confidence in Western methods of
healing, and the work which has been accomplished,
great as it may be considered by itself, is insignificant
compared with what remains to be done. Everywhere
medical missionaries have the same story to tell. The
demand upon their services is far in excess of their
ability to supply, and fresh extensions of their work
are being continually forced upon them. We prayed
that doors might be opened — now the people are
praying us to enter the doors that stand open to re-
ceive us, and we are held back by the want of means."
Not long since a leading article in " The Times "
pressed for the establishment of a female branch of the
Indian medical service in commemoration of the visit
of the King and Queen to India. The writer did not
hesitate to describe the appalling waste of life among
the women and children, and this naturally means a
serious weakening of the health of the general com-
munity. Lady Dufferin's fund has done much to
relieve suffering, but as the correspondence in " The
IN THE ANNE VAUDREY WARD, ST. AGATHA S HOSPITAL,
I'ING YIN, N. CHINA
ST. AGATHA S HOSPITAL, PING YIN. THREE NURSE PROBATIONERS
AN APPEAL in
Times " pointed out, the customs of purdah and caste
are not observed with sufficient care in the hospitals
connected with the fund, so they are not so widely
used as they might be nor by the caste they might
otherwise reach. The missionary hospitals are very
careful to observe the customs of caste and race.
And the missionaries have done what they could to
meet this enormous need of help, and of the four
hundred women doctors in India two hundred are
missionary workers. Miss Ruth Pitt in a letter on
the same subject says that " Medical missions are not "
only "a good thing" as we lightly say in England,
they are " absolutely essential," but, alas, she has to
add that " they are totally insufficient " ; the reproach
of their insufficiency rests upon us at home.
We need then on the authority of those responsible
for the health of India an immense increase of all
forms of medical assistance ; even if we are not able
to extend we can at least consolidate. We can work
for strong centres, no longer leaving one doctor single-
handed in a district as large as our own Eastern
counties but containing a far larger population, as in
the case of Dr. Henry Fowler of the London Mission-
ary Society. We must no longer risk the closing of
a hospital on account of the urgent necessity of holi-
days for an overworked and insufficient staff; but
such a staff can only be made adequate by adequate
help from home.
The same cry comes to us from China, there is the
same insufficiency in Africa, even our own people in
the new lands, up country, in the prairie, or in the bush
ii2 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
are deprived of the medical comforts that they have
been brought up to depend upon in times of sick-
ness.
Mr. J. R. Mott, one of the most inspiring leaders in
the present missionary movement, who has travelled
in nearly every country with eyes made keen by
enthusiasm, writes : " In my judgment well-con-
ducted medical missions were never more needed than
they will be during the next ten years in countries
like the Turkish Empire, the Chinese Empire, and
Africa. They constitute one of the mightiest and most
persuasive of Christian apologetics. In the particular
fields which I have mentioned they will do more than
any other agency to multiply points of contact with
the most difficult classes to be reached by the Christian
propaganda. In this time of strained relations between
races and nations, medical missions, dominated by the
true Christian spirit, will render an indispensable ser-
vice as a mediator."
We can take the evidence of the late Mrs. Isabella
Bishop, who wrote : " I have travelled for more than
seven years in Asia as a traveller entirely unconnected
with missions, except by sympathy and interest. As
a traveller I desire to bear the very strongest testi-
mony that can be borne to the blessing of medical
missions wherever they can be carried on as they
ought to be. On the Western Frontier of China I
should say that a single medical missionary might do
more than twenty evangelistic missionaries at the
present time."
Again, apart from the evidence of missionary en-
AN APPEAL 113
thusiasts or of travellers, we can turn without hesitation
to the testimony of statesmen.
When the operating theatre was added to the
S.P.G. hospital in Peking, it was chiefly through the
help and instrumentality of Sir Ernest Satow and
Sir Robert Hart, two of the greatest administrators
that China has ever known.
Then to the support and encouragement of travellers
and of statesmen we may add the appeal on behalf of
medical missions which was signed by two hundred
and fifty doctors in the diocese of Oxford ; it was
made on the following grounds : —
1. Because such work is commended to us on the
highest authority — the example of our Lord Himself,
the "Good Physician" who went about preaching and
healing all manner of sickness, and all manner of
disease among the people.
2. Because the Church has the example of her
Glorified Head and the authority of Holy Scripture,
for using the healing of the sick as one means through
which the revelation of God's love may be brought
home to mankind. Therefore medical missions should
be regarded as an integral and co-ordinate part of the
mission work of the Christian Church.
3. Because medical missions relieve an unspeakable
amount of human suffering due to the ignorance and
quackery of native doctors.
4. Because in the East it is only through qualified
lady doctors that it is possible to do anything to heal
the diseases of women in the Zenanas.
5. Because of the missionaries themselves, whose
8
ii 4 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
labours are often crippled and their lives shortened
by want of medical aid within a practicable distance,
which medical missionaries can supply.
6. Because the history of medical missions is their
own best justification.
Indeed the history of medical missionaries is their
justification, for their history takes us straight to the
feet of our Lord and Master. He has told us to " Do
this in remembrance of Me," and it is not only of the
Sacrament which gives us the enabling power but of
every action in His life upon earth. He has shown us
the Way, it is for us to follow. And the "healing of
the nations " that we bring in His name must be the
entire healing of the whole man. The history of
Christian medical work proves to us that those who
call themselves Christians have not been unmindful of
the body, but we can never be unmindful of the soul.
There is a legend of St. Francis which remains true as
a type and figure of the work of medical missions.
Out of love to God St. Francis went to visit a leper
" so impatient, so unbearable, so perverse," that none
could approach him. But St. Francis " coming close
to him, saluted him saying, 'God give thee peace,
my brother most dear,' but the leper only turned on
his bed to pour out his anguish of soul against God
and against himself. Then said St Francis: 'My
son, I will myself do this service, seeing thou art not
content with the others '. ' I am willing,' quoth the
sick man, 'but what canst thou do more than the
others.' Replied St. Francis : ' whatsoever thou dost
ask, that will I do '. Quoth the leper : ' I wish that
AN APPEAL u S
thou wash me all over ; for I stink so vilely I cannot
abide myself. Thereupon St. Francis forthwith let
boil water and with many sweet-smelling herbs ; then
stripped him and began to wash him with his own
hands, and it came to pass by a Divine miracle
wherever St Francis touched him with his holy hands
the leprosy departed, and the flesh remained perfectly
whole. And as the flesh began to heal even so began
the soul to be healed also. . . . And being every whit
made whole both in body and soul he humbly con-
fessed his sin."
It is for this double healing that our appeal on be-
half of Medical Missions is made, the Divine miracle
of the healing of the soul that is even greater than the
conquest of leprosy or of any other disease. " I dressed
him and God healed," so spoke the good old Ambroise
Pare ; and the medical missionary of to-day tends the
sick and the diseased, and God heals them still, but
not only in the body, for His power rests upon the soul
also, until the man is every whit whole, cleansed within
and without. We, in England, can sometimes hardly
realize the full meaning of putting on "the new man,"
but when we see the old dominion of fear, of ignorance,
and of despair retreating ; when we see the growth of
confidence, of pity, and of knowledge increasing, we
cannot but own that it is the result of a new life and
of a new power, and that nations are actually being
made new in Christ.
There is no method of imparting this Divine truth
so simple and so direct as that of healing the sick, for
it is the Christ life lived among men, it is the Creed
n6 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
in action. Quite lately a local lawyer in Palestine
when watching the crowds of out-patients at a C.M.S.
hospital, said : " That is the work that sinks into their
hearts, and makes them understand the reality of true
Christianity ". We, in England, who with Sir Thomas
Browne "dare without usurpation to assume the
honourable stile of a Christian," have to show the
reality of our profession by extending to others those
benefits which we are too much inclined to appropriate
to ourselves ; and by the witness of our love and self-
sacrifice to set forward the kingdom and the knowledge
of the Lord.
APPENDIX.
A great impetus has been given to Medical Mission work
in connexion with the S.P.G. by the formation of the
Medical Missions Department with its own Secretary and
Committee, largely composed of medical men and women,
and its own Special Fund, which is kept quite distinct from
the General Fund of the Society. A women's Medical
Mission Guild, which had been formed by Mrs. Mosse,
wife of the Rector of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, in 1905,
was the means of stirring up enthusiasm for Medical Mission
work among its members, and a desire to see the work
greatly extended. This desire found expression in a re-
solution passed at the first S.P.G. Summer School, which
was held at Lowestoft in 1907. Inquiries were made from
the Bishops abroad, which elicited the fact that there was
great need for an extension of Medical Mission work in their
dioceses. As a result the Department was formed by a
resolution of the Standing Committee of the Society passed
in the autumn of 1908, the women's Medical Mission Guild
becoming the " Special Needs Section ".
At the end of 1911, the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel had thirty-two fully qualified doctors in the
Mission Field, eight men and twenty-four women, as well
as fifteen qualified native assistants working under their
supervision. Fifteen British nurses, together with a large
number of native nurses and European and native evangel-
ists, were working in the missionary hospitals and dis-
pensaries.
("7)
n8 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
In India, in the diocese of Lahore, the S.P.G. helps to
support St. Stephen's Hospital, Delhi, with its daughter
hospitals at Karnal and Rewari. The staff of six doctors,
four English nurses and two hospital evangelists, besides
two native nurses, compounders and Biblewomen, is large, but
not too large for the important work that is carried on in
these places and the surrounding districts. The number of
out-patients who attended during 191 1 was 38,578, while
the in-patients numbered 1487.
At Rawal Pindi, in the same diocese, the Society is re-
sponsible for the support of a small hospital, which accom-
modates twelve in-patients, under the charge of a fully
qualified European doctor, with the assistance of a European
matron, some itinerating work in the villages also being
undertaken.
At Cawnpore, in the diocese of Lucknow, St. Catherine's
hospital was built by the Society in 1898 ; the work has gone
on increasing, and Cawnpore is now one of the largest medical
stations. It has a staff of three English women doctors,
one of whom does itinerating work in the surrounding vil-
lages, two English nurses, and several native nurses. There
were over 19,000 attendances at the dispensary in 191 1,
while 662 were taken into the hospital.
In the diocese of Chota Nagpur, at Murhic, the centre of
a large district where two bazaars are held weekly, excellent
work is being done by a staff of two priest- doctors, assisted
by an English nurse. The hospital contains eight wards
with two or three beds in each, where 169 in-patients were
treated in 191 1. At the dispensary, 5348 out-patients
attended and itinerating work was done in the villages.
Dispensary work is carried on at Itki in the same diocese
under a fully qualified European doctor with the help of a
native surgeon. During 191 1 there were 3646 out-patients.
INTERIOR OF WARD. ST. LUKE'S HOSPITAL, NAZARETH, S. INDIA
Mm.
sr. luke's hospital, nazarkth
APPENDIX i, g
The Society also helps to support the medical work which
is carried on at Ranch', Hazaribagh and Chitarpur in this
diocese, each showing about 20,000 attendances.
In South India very good work is being done at St.
Luke's Hospital, Nazareth, in the diocese of Tinnevelly
under the charge of an English doctor, where 18,195 out-
patients were seen in the dispensary and 202 patients
treated in the hospital during the past year. The doctor
also visits in the surrounding villages and supervises the
medical work carried on at St. Antony's dispensary in the
large village of Chrislianagram, where the majority of the
inhabitants are Mohammedans. The medical work is al-
most the only means of getting into touch with the women
and over 7000 patients were seen during the year. At St.
Raphael's dispensary at Sawyerpuram, which is supervised
by the same doctor with the assistance of a fully qualified
native surgeon, 8000 out-patients were seen and there were
39 in-patients.
At Ramnad, in the same diocese, a woman doctor was
sent out by the Society to take charge of the dispensary in
1 910. Since then the medical work has increased so much
that a hospital has been begun and the first block was
opened a few months ago. But the work is much hindered
for want of funds, as the number of in-patients cannot be
increased until there is more accommodation. Itinerating
work is being done in the surrounding villages and 13,076
out-patients attended the dispensary in 191 2.
At Tuticorin, in the same diocese, a priest-doctor is doing
itinerating work, the S.P.G. being responsible for his salary.
In North China, the Society with the help of the North
China Mission Association, supports the Church of England
Hospital at Peking, where an English doctor, with the help
of a fully qualified Chinese assistant, and two English
120 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
nurses, is doing very good work, though the revolution
somewhat interfered with it. At one time it was feared
that the hospital would have to be closed, but happily this
was not necessary. The number of in-patients was small, as
the women's ward was only open during part of the year,
owing to the illness of the nurse who was single-handed,
only 137 in-patients being received, though the attendance
of out-patients was over 13,000.
In the diocese of Shantung, medical work was begun six
years ago in a small mud hut at Ping Yin, but now there is
a fine stone hospital built on rising ground above the city,
dedicated to the memory of St. Agatha, and containing
three wards opening on to a wide verandah with accommo-
dation for twenty-eight patients. In the compound are the
doctor's house and the dispensary. The staff consists of an
English doctor and nurse with three Chinese nurse-proba-
tioners. A second doctor is urgently needed to carry on
the work. Branch dispensaries have been established in
four of the neighbouring villages. During 191 2 the
number of out-patients seen at the dispensary was 7752,
while there were 124 in-patients.
At Yen Chow Fu, in the same diocese, where many
thousands of Chinese pilgrims resort annually to visit the
shrine of Confucius, a hospital is being built. A doctor
has already been sent out to take charge of the work, and
until the hospital is ready is doing dispensary and itinerat-
ing work.
In Corea, the S.P.G. helps to support St. Luke's Hospital
at Chemulpo, where an English doctor is in charge, assisted
by his wife, who is a trained nurse, with another nurse and
dispenser. Some Corean boys have been trained to help
in the wards, where there is accommodation for thirty-six
patients. The numbers treated in the hospital during the
APPENDIX 121
year were 305, while over 5000 out-patients were seen at
the dispensary.
At Ay In Hospital, Chin Chun, a village of two or three
hundred houses, a doctor and an evangelist are doing very
good work amongst patients who come from villages often
over forty miles away. In the hospital there are no beds,
as the patients sleep on the hot floor in wadded quilts, the
hospital being made as much as possible like a native
house. During 191 2, 11,105 patients attended the dis-
pensary, and there were 133 in-patients. The evangelist
visits the patients after they have been seen at the
hospital in order to impress upon them what they have
heard of the Gospel.
At Paik Chun, a small place on the coast, medical work
has just been begun by a woman doctor who went out in
1910 to help in the work at Chemulpo. It is hoped that a
nurse may be sent out to help her within the next few
months.
In the diocese of Labuan and Sarawak, Borneo, there
is a hospital at Banting in the jungle, where an English
doctor and nurse are in charge. The hospital, which
is built of ironwood, tarred outside and whitewashed in-
side, contains three rooms with a verandah in front, very
simply furnished, as the patients sleep on the floor and
bring their own mats. The work has so much increased
that the hospital needs enlarging and a bungalow is to be
built for the use of the nurse and a teacher. The medical
work has been invaluable in breaking down heathen super-
stitions and the power of the witch doctors.
At Malacca, in the diocese of Singapore, the S.P.G. helps
to support the medical work which has been started
amongst women. An old Dutch house has been adapted
for use as a dispensary and hospital. Two women doctors
i22 THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
are working there with one English and three native assist-
ants. The attendances in 1912 numbered 6752.
In South Africa, St. Barnabas' Hospital, at Mkngana in
West Pondoland, in the diocese of St. John's, Kaffraria, is
assisted by the S.P.G. The work is increasing and a further
addition has been made to the hospital owing to the
demand for more room for in-patients, twenty-nine of whom
were treated during the year, while over 1300 out-patients
were seen in the dispensary.
The S.P.G. also gives a grant towards the medical work
at St. Lucy's Hospital, Tsolo, where the wards are kept well
filled by patients of all classes, the in-patients numbering
167 and the out-patients 4707.
THE FIRST HOSPITAL AT ST. BARNABAS MISSION, MLENGANA,
PONDOLAND WEST
BACK OF ETALASENI HOSPITAL, ZULULAND. GKOL P OF HOUSE GIRLS AND
CONVALESCENT CHILDREN
INDEX.
Africa, 24, 26, 30, 41, 51, 66, 85,
97. 122.
Allen, Mrs. Dexter, 70, 75, 96.
Amatongo, 5.
American Board, 85, 8g.
— Presbyterians, 89.
Amulets, 11.
Antle, Rev. J., 107.
Aspland, Dr., 11, 79-84, 87, 88.
Banda, 28, 66.
Beard, Rev. W. L., 85.
Bearder, Miss, 50.
Bishop, Mrs., 7, 87, 112.
Blair, Mrs., 28.
Bombay Health Report, 85.
Borneo, 66, 70, g6, 121.
— witch doctor, 9.
Boxer rising, 106.
British Columbia, 107.
Browning, Mrs. Barrett, 42.
Buddhists, 32, 36.
Callaway, Bishop, 97.
Cawnpore, 26, 27, gi, 118.
Champneys, Sir F., 95.
Charms, 7, 10, n, 12.
Chemulpo, 67, 92, 104.
China, n, 14, 18-23, 29, 35, 36, 41,
50, 67, 7g-84, 88, 106, 107,
ng.
Chin Chun, 52.
Chinese Medical Missionary As-
sociation, 93.
— medicines, 22.
Chitarpur, 48.
Cholera, 75.
— mother, 7.
Chota Nagpur, 6, n, 74, 107, 118.
( I2 3)
Church of England Zenana Mis-
sionary Society, 94.
— Missionary Society, 75, 88, 94.
Codrington, General, 45.
Combley, Nurse, 76.
Cooper, Professor, ig.
Cooper, Sir W., 104.
Copleston, Bishop R. S., 6.
Corea, 52, 67, go, g2, 104, 120.
Corfe, Bishop, 104.
Cowley Fathers, 98.
Cruickshank, Dr. Mary, 51.
Dawson, Dr., 91.
Death-rates, 34, .85, iog.
Delhi, 12, 39, 54, 78, gg, 118.
Demons, 6, 14.
Dogura, 76.
Dufferin's (Lady) Fund, no.
Edwards, Dr. Wynne, 77, 78.
Fakirs, 12.
Famine, 73.
Feng-Shui, 7.
Fishe, Dr. Marcia, 100.
Fowler, Dr. Henry, in.
Girls' Friendly Society,
104.
Hakim, ii.
Harding, Dr. Annie, 100.
Hart, Sir Robert, 28, 113.
Harvard University Medical
School, 89.
Hayes, Dr. Marie, 52, 70.
Hazaribagh, n, 4g, 74, 107, ng.
Hearn, Dr., 107.
124
THE CLAIM OF SUFFERING
Hindus, u, 35, 37, 40, 56, 79,
85.
Hsi Liang, Viceroy, 83.
Human sacrifice, 5.
Ikdia, 12, 13, 24-28, 30, 34, 36, 38,
39> 47. 49, 52. 54. 56, 60, 70,
73, 75. 77. 85, 91, 99-104, 107,
109, 118.
Insanity, 35.
Itinerating, 60.
Jackson, Dr. A. F., 83.
Japanese Red Cross Society, 104.
Jercherla, 56.
Kalasapad, 75.
Karens, 93.
Karnal, 13, 60, 92, 100, 118.
Kennedy, Dr., 47.
Kingsley, Charles, 72.
" Lancet," The, 33.
Landis, Dr., 105.
Laws, Dr., 52, 105.
Lepers, 34, 70.
Livingstone, Dr., 94.
London Missionary Society, 36,
89, in.
— School of Tropical Medicine,
75-
MacMurtrie, Dr., 51, 98.
Macphail, Dr. J., xio.
Malacca, 55, 121.
Marriage, 37.
Marval, Dr. Alice, 54, 77, 104.
May, Miss, 60.
McDougall, Dr., 96.
Medical Missionary Association of
London, 89.
— Mission Guild, 117.
— training, 87.
Medicine men, 8, 12, 40.
Mencius, 43.
Mohammedans, 11, 32, 36, 43, 49,
56, 85.
Moore, Sir W., 109.
Mosse, Mrs., 117.
Mott, J. R., 112.
Moule, Archdeacon, 18.
Miiller, Dr., 12, 78.
Murhu, 26, 47, 118.
Murree Ali, evil goddess, 7.
Mysore, state of, 41.
Nat worship, 6.
Nazareth, 27, ng.
New Guinea, 76.
Ngcira, 8, 10.
Nurses, training of, 90.
Pare, Ambroise, 23, 77.
Parennin, Fr., 33.
Peking, 11, 29.
Pennell, Dr., 12, 38.
Phillips, Dr., 14, 20, 29, 107.
Ping Yin, 14, 20, 50.
Pitt, Miss Ruth, in.
Plague, 77-85.
Pondoland, 51.
Poole, Miss, 30.
Ramamurthi, K., 37.
Ramnad, 12, 119.
Ranchi, 49.
Rewari, 52, 70, 118.
Rhodes, Fr. Bernard, 22.
Root, Dr. Pauline, 37.
St. Francis, 114.
Satow, Sir Ernest, 113.
Scott, Dr. A., 101.
Severance Hospital Medical Col-
lege, 90.
Shanghai Conference, 1890, 35.
Shen-nung, Emperor, 18.
Siamese, 20.
Sirivamosa, Prince, 43.
Smelling out, 8.
Sorcerers, 8.
Spirit houses, 5.
Spirits, 5, 7, 10, 12, 13.
Staley, Dr. Mildred, 13, 24, 39,
55-
Stevenson, Dr. Mabel, 57, 60.
Strachan, Dr. (Bishop of Ran-
goon), 93.
Tsolo, 26, 51, 98.
Unkulunkulu, 5.
INDEX
125
United Free Church of Scotland,
83, no.
Universities Mission to Central
Africa, 94.
Vaccination, 15.
Walden, Miss E. , 78, 104.
Wantage Sisters, 98.
Wells, Dr. Russel, 44.
Weston, Mrs., 27, 29.
Widowhood, 37.
Winter, Mrs., 99.
Witchcraft, 4.
Witch doctors, 8, 9, 10.
Wu, Dr., 81.
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